Buddy MacMaster’s jig

~ a Christmas gift for someone I don’t know. This one is familiar but I haven’t yet found another name for it. I think it is a Buddy MacMaster take on an old standard, but he does it differently enough, as does Natalie MacMaster, that it at least may deserve its own place here…

Merry Christmas to the person who asked about this in the ‘Discussions’…

You can make this as individual as you like, some folks hate cinammon, so they can do it without…

A good quality cloudy apple cidre / cider ~ if you can’t press your own
A generous portion of cranberry juice to bring it to a blush, a mug’s worth will do
one split vanilla pod ( or some essence )
whole cloves, allspice berries, cinnamon sticks, mace leaves
cardamon pods ~ which we both love
a knob of fresh ginger (baby/young ginger if you can find it) ~ or galingal (kra-chai) if you’re brave, sliced in…
I then take a mandarin/tangerine/clementine, whatever is on hand and orange, a lemon and a lime, unwaxed, slice them up and throw them in as well…

All that goes in a big pan and you heat it all up the previous day, then cover it and put it aside to let it infuse overnight. Use the following day or days…

You can have it or serve it alcohol free, our choice today, or add calvados or applejack or a nice brandy or rum… I usually throw a shot into a mug and then top it up with the punch. If you wanted you can decorate it with a slice of apple and a couple of cranberries and/or blueberries foating on top. That’s if the relatives are coming over and you want to raise the festive nature of the brew…

You can do the same thing with wine of course, but you need to sweeten it and make sure it doesn’t boil or it will go sour and need more sweetener. If wine I use a good dollop of our house sugar, which is 2 parts demerara to 1 part dark muskovado…

# Posted on December 18th 2006 by chef4life
https://thesession.org/discussions/12077

NOTE: cidre / cider is what we used to call the apple juice we got from grinding up and pressing apples, not the readily available fermented product various commercial enterprises make available.

I’ve not tried this recipe with those, but I suspect that could be an option, though the heat would evaporate any alcohol. If I was going to do it that way I’d use scrumpy… I much prefer fruit juice, but we both like the fermented stuff too and have made that ourselves in the past, sometimes with disasterous results, like when several caboys full of the stuff exploded when the pulp from the apples went into the bubbler and clogged it up. We heard the bangs and it took days to clean up… You learn from your mistakes, eh… :-/

There are other ways to take the last two bars of the A & B parts, for two examples ~

| GBA GFE | FDD D2 || ~ or ~ | GFG EAG | FDC D2 || ~ or ~