Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A cordial made from wine and flavored with spices, formerly used as a medicine.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An old medicinal drink composed of wine with an infusion of spices and other ingredients, used as a cordial. Also hippocrass.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A cordial made of spiced wine, etc.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A cordial made of spiced wine, etc.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English ipocras, from Old French ypocras, hypocras, from alteration of Hippocras, Hippocrates.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French ipocras, ypocras ("Hippocrates"), after Medieval Latin vinum Hippocraticum ("Hippocrates's wine") (because it was filtered through a Hippocrates sleeve).

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Examples

  • Eat this slice of marchpane, it will help your digestion; then shall you be presented with a cup of claret hippocras, which is right healthful and stomachal.

    Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002

  • Eat this slice of marchpane, it will help your digestion; then shall you be presented with a cup of claret hippocras, which is right healthful and stomachal.

    Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002

  • Heyford, tell thy comely wife that I and Hastings will sup with her to-morrow, for her hippocras is a rare dainty.

    The Last of the Barons — Volume 06 Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton 1838

  • Heyford, tell thy comely wife that I and Hastings will sup with her to-morrow, for her hippocras is a rare dainty.

    The Last of the Barons — Complete Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton 1838

  • Eat this slice of marchpane, it will help your digestion; then shall you be presented with a cup of claret hippocras, which is right healthful and stomachal.

    Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 3 Fran��ois Rabelais 1518

  • To make hippocras: Take a gallon of claret of white wine, and put therein four ounces of ginger, an ounce and a half of nutmegs, of cloves one quarter, of sugar four pound; let all this stand together in a pot at least twelve hours, then take it, and put it into a clean bag made for the purpose, so that the wine may come with good leisure from the spices.

    hippocras « paper fruit 2009

  • Illustrations in medieval health handbooks often depict people buying spiced wine (hippocras), which being classed as drying and heating was considered a tasty and convenient remedy for a cool or wet affliction, or merely as a safeguard against the perils of the cold and wet winter: not unlike a vaccination.

    A Conversation with Jack Turner 2010

  • To make hippocras: Take a gallon of claret of white wine, and put therein four ounces of ginger, an ounce and a half of nutmegs, of cloves one quarter, of sugar four pound; let all this stand together in a pot at least twelve hours, then take it, and put it into a clean bag made for the purpose, so that the wine may come with good leisure from the spices.

    2009 September « paper fruit 2009

  • Every weekend the couple and their friends -- who call themselves the Gentsche Ghesellen, or Ghent companions -- sleep in windowless tent encampments where they build benches from branches, bake bread, sing religious tributes to the Virgin Mary and drink hippocras, a 14th-century wine drink spiced with ginger, cloves and pepper.

    Archive 2007-04-01 2007

  • Every weekend the couple and their friends -- who call themselves the Gentsche Ghesellen, or Ghent companions -- sleep in windowless tent encampments where they build benches from branches, bake bread, sing religious tributes to the Virgin Mary and drink hippocras, a 14th-century wine drink spiced with ginger, cloves and pepper.

    Medieval re-enacting in Belgium 2007

Comments

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  • A beverage composed of wine, with spices ans sugar, strained through a cloth. It is said to have taken its name from Hippocrates' sleeve, the term apothecaries gave to a strainer. 'Ipocras" seems to have been a great favourite with our ancestors, being served up at every entertainment, public or private. it generally made a part of the last course, and was taken immediately after dinner with wafers of some other light biscuits.

    According to Pegge, it was in use at St. John's College, Cambridge, as late as the eighteenth century, and brought in at Christmas at the close of dinner.

    James Halliwell, Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855

    February 4, 2009

  • "Red hippocras was made of claret, brandy, sugar, spices, almonds, and new milk."

    —Sarah Hand Meacham, Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 11

    June 7, 2010

  • One variation/mispronunciation is whippincrust.

    June 7, 2010

  • "The methods of preparing spiced wine remained much the same throughout the Middle Ages. The basic technique was to mix and grind a variety of spices, which were then added to the wine, red or white, which was then sweetened with sugar or honey and finally filtered through a bag, bladder, or cloth. The latter was known as 'Hippocrates's sleeve,' hence the wine's name, 'hippocras.' A late fourteenth-century book of household management gives the following instructions:

    'To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter of very fine cinnamon selected by tasting it, and half a quarter of fine flour of cinnamon, an ounce of selected string ginger (gingembre de mesche), fine and white, and an ounce of grain (of paradise), a sixth of nutmegs and galangal together, and grind them all together. And when you would make your hippocras, take a good half ounce of this powder and two quarters of sugar and mix them with a quart of wine, by Paris measure.'"
    --Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 113-114

    Additional note(s) on clarry.

    December 2, 2016

  • "One English culinary manuscripts gives details for the preparation of three variants of hippocras, specifying different quantities of spice according to rank and budget: pro rege, pro domino, and, with the least spice of all, pro populo."

    --Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 135

    December 2, 2016

  • A warthog, you’re saying, lacks class.

    You claim that a rhino’s badass,

    But since quite a lot of us

    Admire hippopotamus

    Then call not the poor hippocras.

    February 21, 2018