Recipe of the Month: Twelfth Night Cider 🍎

It’s cold outside—perfect weather for cozy, warm drinks like this delicious non-alcoholic spiced cider, inspired by an early 19th-century recipe.

Twelfth Night Cider. Photo by Nole Garey.

I’m by no means the first person to publish a book with non-alcoholic drinks. I’m not even the most prolific non-alcoholic recipe writer. Helen Watkeys Moore beat me to the punch in 1919 and surpassed my book’s total of 60 recipes when she authored a cookbook entitled, “Uncle Sam’s Water Wagon: 500 Delicious Drinks That Can Be Made at Home.”

My only defense is that I didn’t include a recipe for “Castor Oil and Sarsaparilla.” However, I did borrow from Moore.

While Moore may have made a few missteps in her volume, she certainly makes up in quantity for what her book lacks in quality. She covers virtually every non-alcoholic drink under the sun, including tea, coffee, chocolate, milk, malted milk, egg drinks, fruit drinks, cider, grape juice, ginger ale, punches, 'invalid drinks' (?!), sodas, and sundaes. But not a single alcoholic drink—which was not always the case for recipe books during Prohibition that offered would-be-wet denizens recipes for home-brewed beer. This absence led one reviewer from The Alliance Herald in 1920 to conclude:

In the whole volume of a hundred odd pages there is not a single recipe for home brew, and while we fear this may cause some of the men to turn away in disgust, others will turn its pages with avidity, seeking at least one recipe out of the five hundred that will be fit to drink.

I did, in fact, “turn its pages with avidity” and found that one recipe––this delicious mulled cider, Twelfth Night Cider.

Thank you to Oar Health for sponsoring Positive Damage.