With the wassailing bowl: resurrecting the festive tradition of wassail

By Jared Bernard

On a stiff winter solstice in a cabin on Sturgeon Lake near Grande Prairie, I find myself neatly studding oranges with cloves. “Oh, I used to do that,” my mother-in-law Cheryl exclaims. “We used to put them in the closet to freshen the air.”

She looks intrigued as these oranges slide into the oven with a different agenda. Just the thing for a frigid -27°C morning: resurrecting the festive tradition of wassail.

Many of us are familiar with the jaunty holiday tune, or at least a variation that replaces a-wassailing with a-caroling, conjuring nostalgic notions of a scarf-wrapped choir visiting door-to-door. Yet as I attempt my recreation, I soon discover that this beverage and its customs are dizzyingly ancient.

Essentially wassail is apple cider — spiked with ale and/or wine — mulled with extra spices and bobbing roasted oranges or lemons. Considering the strong attachment this tradition has to orchards, my sweetie Kelsey and I sit at the kitchen table to peel and quarter a dozen Macintosh apples for the cider. As these simmer just underwater for a few hours, I lob a sachet d’épices into the stockpot — whole cloves, allspice berries, cinnamon sticks.

At England’s University of Leicester, professor Philip Shaw researches medieval literature. He illuminates the depth of the history behind wassail. “The phrase wassail appears to derive from the Old English wæs h¯al, meaning ‘be well’,” Shaw tells me. The Old English word h¯al means whole or healthy, and gives us the word heal.

“As far as I know, the earliest reference to the phrase wassail as a toast occurs in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,” says Shaw. Although Geoffrey’s 1136 text is now known to be largely embellished, he depicts Rowena as greeting the Briton King Vortigern with the phrase wæs h¯al in 449 when her father, the Jute chief Hengist, offered her hand in marriage in exchange for the Kingdom of Kent. This is the seminal moment in which the Anglo-Saxon tribes took advantage of the power vacuum left by the Romans to conquer Britain in the late 5th and 6th centuries.

I ask Shaw whether wassail could be a tradition the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain from their Danish/Germanic territories. “We do not know, of course, whether this reflects a genuine earlier tradition or not. We have no evidence on precisely what was involved in Anglo-Saxon celebrations of Yule or M¯odraniht.”

Yule, which dates back to at least the 4th century, was a winter celebration that took place during the 12 days following the fertility holiday of M¯odraniht (Mother’s Night) on December 24th.

Kelsey and I partially core half a dozen more apples that will be packed with cane sugar and roasted alongside my two studded oranges at 250°F for about an hour. I’d searched for an authentic recipe, but there is no singular means of making wassail. In Robert Herrick’s 1648 book Hesperides, his poem “Twelfth Night: Or, King and Queen,” includes this recipe:

Next, crown the bowl full
With gentle lambs-wool;
Add sugar, nutmeg, and ginger,
With store of ale too;
And thus ye must do
To make the wassail a swinger.

Once the cider is strained, it’s heated (not boiled), the booze is added, and it’s inoculated with a new spice sachet to imbibe it with Herrick’s nutmeg and ginger, plus more allspice and cinnamon. At everyone’s request, I substitute rum for ale.

You probably noticed Herrick’s mention of lambs-wool. This is basically whipped eggs, or a drink made from them. The frothiness is supposed to be reminiscent of wool. If this makes your stomach churn, remember that another holiday beverage from that era is eggnog.

I beat the egg whites until they almost become meringue and then I fold the yolks back into them. But before adding it to the concoction, I enter strategic negotiations that result in compromises with everyone that there will be a larger egg-free batch of wassail.

In Herrick’s day, wassailing was reaching new heights. All affluent houses had special wassailing bowls, often made from a newly discovered hardwood called lignum-vitae from lands in and around the Caribbean Sea. Wassailing bowls were carved from a single log on a lathe to create a large vessel on a pedestal, topped with an ornately carved lid that included a smaller acorn-shaped bowl for spices. These sets were usually equipped with several durable cups.

I don’t have any special cups, but I turn on some wassailing songs to make the event more festive. There’s a cornucopia of songs about this drink. The old Gloucestershire song testifies to the importance of the bowls:

Wassail, wassail all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown.
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree,
With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee.

In The Accomplisht Cook, printed in 1660, Robert May tells us to top off our wassail with pieces of sopping bread. “Drinks used to be served sometimes with a piece of toast in them,” Shaw explains. “That tradition has led to our modern usage of the word as a verb: to toast someone or something.”

Tour through Southern England on January 17th and you’re likely to hear some strange noises. That’s because many of these villages have maintained the old traditions of wassailing, particularly orchard wassailing.

This is cider country, and what better to improve productivity than chasing away evil spirits? In Maplehurst, West Sussex, John Batcheldor owns an orchard that gets the full treatment every year.

“He’s only small scale with three acres of cider apple orchards, producing about a thousand gallons of cider per year,” says Jackie Johnson, the cider coordinator for the Campaign for Real Ale in West Sussex. She tells me that they typically get a turnout of between 70 and 200 people.

Apple-howling is what they call their wassailing around here, Johnson says proudly. The ceremony includes marching into the orchard while making “a big hullabaloo” to scare away the evil spirits, including firing a shotgun.

They also place pieces of toast in the tree. Johnson laughs that the toast “has to be put there by virgins, a bit of a problem sometimes!”

This wassail is a strange drink that has intimate ties to the history of Britain. The origin of the verb toast, has survived Christianization, and has the power to invoke a good apple harvest. But when I drink this warm spiced beverage in our cabin on a snowy winter solstice, there is only one thing to know about it: it makes everyone
happy.

Jared Bernard has a bachelor of science degree and he loves learning new things about the world.