Mulled Sweet Cider with Nutmeg and Cloves
Reader ratingsSweet apple cider simmered for fifteen minutes with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and brown sugar, never boiled: an alcohol-free mulled cider from a 1919 temperance drinks book.
- Recipe makes
- About 7 1/2 cups, 8 small mugs
- Prep
- Cook
- Total
Includes about 5 minutes to bring the cider up to a simmer and 15 minutes of simmering.
Mulled sweet cider in two brown earthenware mugs, with a brown earthenware pitcher of more.
The story behind the recipe
Mulled sweet cider is fresh apple cider heated slowly with spice and sugar. Helen Watkeys Moore found room for it in 1919, in a book of five hundred drinks “free from the alcoholic taint,” and her first version is the plainest: two quarts of cider, a crushed nutmeg, six cloves, three pieces of cinnamon and a cup of brown sugar, simmered for a quarter of an hour and never allowed to boil.
A water-wagon book
To be “on the water wagon” was to have sworn off drink, and Moore’s title, On Uncle Sam’s Water Wagon, put the whole country on it. On the page with this recipe, a cold cider poured over cracked ice with nutmeg and mint comes first, and two more mulled ciders follow, both thickened with beaten egg whites, a dozen of them in the third.
The cider she meant was sweet cider, unfermented juice. Three years later Joseph S. Caldwell’s Department of Agriculture bulletin on making it on the farm warned that cider left in the barrel could pass “more than one-half of 1 per cent of alcohol,” leaving whoever sold it “liable to prosecution under the national prohibition act.” He kept his juice sweet by heating it to 175°F, which Moore’s simmer passes easily.
Read more about this recipe
Less sugar for modern cider
This version keeps Moore’s cider and spices but cuts her cup of brown sugar to a quarter cup. Supermarket cider is already sweet, at about 10 to 11 grams of sugar per 100 ml, so taste before adding more; for the full 1919 sweetness, use the whole cup. Moore’s nutmeg was “finely crushed,” which leaves grit in the mug, so here it is only cracked into pieces and strained out with the cloves and cinnamon. Expect a hazy, deep amber drink.
Buy pasteurized cider. The FDA warns that juice which has not been pasteurized or otherwise treated can carry harmful bacteria, and that children, older adults, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems are most at risk. Raw cider sold by the glass at farm stands need not carry a warning label. The CDC has traced outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 to unpasteurized apple juice.
For cider’s run from the Thanksgiving table to the 1840 campaign, read What Did Early Americans Drink at Harvest?; for a hot apple drink made with ale, try lambswool.
Recipe makes: About 7 1/2 cups, 8 small mugs
Ingredients
For About 7 1/2 cups, 8 small mugs. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for About 7 1/2 cups, 8 small mugs.
- Pasteurized sweet apple cider8 cups
- Nutmeg1
- Cloves6
- Cinnamon sticks3
- Packed brown sugar, or to taste1/4 cup
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 8 cups pasteurized sweet apple cider
- 1 whole nutmeg
- 6 whole cloves
- 3 cinnamon sticks
- 1/4 cup packed brown sugar, or to taste
Equipment
Large saucepan or kettle
Fine strainer
Ladle
Instructions
Wrap the whole nutmeg in a clean kitchen towel and hit it firmly with a rolling pin to crack it into four or five pieces.
Put the pasteurized sweet apple cider in a large saucepan with the cracked nutmeg, the whole cloves, the cinnamon sticks and the brown sugar.
Heat over medium-low heat, stirring until the sugar has dissolved, until small bubbles rise at the edge of the pan. Turn the heat down and keep it at that gentle simmer for 15 minutes. Don’t let it boil.
Taste, and stir in more brown sugar if you want it sweeter.
Strain into a warmed pitcher, or ladle straight from the pan through a small strainer into mugs. Serve at once.
Nutrition
130calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- About 7 1/2 cups, 8 small mugs
- Servings
- 8
Roughly estimated from USDA FoodData Central values for apple juice and brown sugar, for one 7 fl oz mug with the reduced sugar.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
This is Moore’s full recipe of two quarts. Halve or double everything together.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the batch.
Moore’s two quarts are US quarts, about 1.9 liters, which is 8 cups. Some evaporates while it simmers, so the yield is a little less.
Her “three pieces of cinnamon” are taken here as three cinnamon sticks. A cup of brown sugar, her full amount, is about 200 g packed; the quarter cup here is about 50 g.
If you use raw, unpasteurized cider, keep it at the simmer for the full 15 minutes before serving. Raw cider served cold skips that heating, and that is the risk the FDA warns about.
Scaling changes the ingredients only; glassware, ice and timings need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.
Sources and attribution
Helen Watkeys Moore, On Uncle Sam’s Water Wagon: 500 Recipes for Delicious Drinks (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), “Mulled Cider No. 1”, p. 118
Recipe details
- Drink
- Alcohol-free
- Drink family
- Hot Drinks
- Region
- American
- Source decade
- 1910s
- Difficulty
- Easy