This is a Twelfth Night drink, for the dark end of the Christmas week when the tree has started to drop its needles and the cold outside has settled in for the long stretch of January. It's older than mulled wine. Older than most things still worth doing in a kitchen. People were warming ale with roasted apples and spices when the word Christmas hadn't been invented yet, and the recipe has survived because the instinct behind it is right: when it's cold and dark, you warm something fragrant on the hob and pass it around.

The trick is the apples. Most people making a wassail bowl skip the roasting and end up with ordinary mulled ale, which is fine, but isn't the same thing. You want the apples baked first until the skins wrinkle and the sugar turns sticky and dark, because it's that caramel that goes into the ale and makes the whole bowl taste of winter orchards rather than just spice. There's an old name for it, lamb's wool, from the way the soft apple flesh frays on the surface of the drink. I like that. A drink named for how it looks when it's ready.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first year I made it properly: "Twelfth Night. Roasted apples. The house smelled of cloves and oranges until the next morning." I've made it every January since. We're only making a hot drink, but there's something about a steaming pan of spiced ale with apples bobbing in it that turns an ordinary evening into something older and quieter and better. Pass it around. Say wes hal. Mean it.