Caudle

[2] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, the word derived from Medieval Latin caldellum, a diminutive of caldum, a warm drink, from calidus, hot.

[8] In a description of an initiation ceremony at Merton College, Oxford in 1647, caudle is described as a "syrupy gruel with spices and wine or ale added".

[10] The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition describes it as "a drink of warm gruel, mixed with spice and wine, formerly given to women in childbed",[3] i.e. as a restorative food during her postpartum confinement.

[14] ("Lying-in" is an obsolete term for childbirth, referring to the extended period of bed rest that marked the traditional recuperation time.)

The American playwright Royall Tyler has one of the female characters in the comedy of manners The Contrast (1787) decline the offer of a man's escorting her by claiming that "half [her] visits are cake and caudel" and therefore unsuitable for him.

[17] A generation later in 1821, Thomas Gaspey wrote of these visits (with the italics in the original): 'Twas then Eliza, though now Mrs. T. We ought to call her, gave her lord an heir, And all her female friends, the babe to see And praise its beauty, failed not to repair; But half what they to utter there thought meet, While taking caudle, I must not repeat.

After the christening of the youngest, Princess Amelia in 1783, "the greater part of the company then paid a visit to the nursery, where they were entertained (as usual on such occasions) with cake and caudel.

The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée reported that the aftermath of a royal birth was "a usual reception of the public to cake and caudel".

[22]In England, the custom had died out by around 1850,[23] but the birth of the current King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands in Utrecht in 1967 was celebrated there a few days later by an apparently all-male caudle (candeel in Dutch) party including his father, the Prime Minister, and other dignitaries, who wore morning dress to eat caudle with teaspoons from highly decorated handleless cups with saucers, held up near the mouth, as the photos in the state archives show.

There was a vessel particular to the drink, the caudle cup, a traditional gift, either for a pregnant woman,[25] or on visits by female friends to the mother lying-in.

A caudle formed part of the Beltane (May Day) fire festival celebrations collated by James Frazier in The Golden Bough.

He quotes at length Thomas Pennant, "who traveled in Perthshire in the year 1769": on the first of May, the herdsmen of every village hold their Bel-tien, a rural sacrifice.

[31] Apparently it was "a custom in France to bring the bridegroom a caudle in the middle of the night on his wedding-night", according to an explanatory note in an 1877 edition of The Essays of Montaigne, presumably inserted by the English editor, William Carew Hazlitt.