Caudle/Cawdel/Caudel – A Winterdrink

08.12.2016 by Rotschopf in Medieval cooking

It is wintertime and from everywhere I geht recipes for Hypocras during this season. Hypocras is delicious and quickly goes to your head. But I have wanted to try another recipe for quite some time. Caudel or Cawdel.

This beverage seems to be a specifically english one and is the predecessor of Butterbeer. Yes, that’s right,  Butterbeer is a thing and even apart from the Warner Brothers Adventure Worlds of Harry Potter. Yet Butterbeer only appears in the early 16th century, which is why I’ll stick to older recipies.

Here and here there are some great overviews over the different versions of the drink. As you can see, they are very versatile and often one does not compare to another version at all. A lot of them have the use of an alkoholic drink with eggyolk and safran in common.

The ingredients:

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I bout some english brown ale and used 3 egg yolks from free-range eggs, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar and approximately 10-15 strands of safron.

The recipe:

Actually it is a very simple recipe. I heated the beer with the safron and mixed the egg yolks and the sugar until they were smooth, before the beer cooked, I slowly poured it into the egg mixture while stiring and then back to the pot to cook it for another 5 minutes.

Tastetest:

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I could not imagine, but the Caudel was actually very nice. The taste lies somewhere between eggnog and coffee with a hint of dark bread. The consistency is a bit like milk. You do taste the beer which is why I will probably use a less bitter and dark ale next time, but the yolk smoothed everything out very nicely.

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