1871 Oxford Night Caps a collection of receipts for making various beverages used in the university

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three slices of lemon, and a few lumps of loaf sugar rubbed on the peeling of a lemon, are introduced. Bottle this mixture, and in a few days it may be drank in a state of effervescence. The Wassail Bowl, or Wassail Cup, was formerly prepared in nearly the same ·way as at present, excepting that roasted apples, or crab apples, were introduced instead of toasted bread. And up to the present period in some parts of the kingdom, there are persons who keep up the ancient custom of regailing their friends and neighbours on Christmas-eve and Twelfth-eve with a Wassail Bowl, with roasted apples floating in it, and which is generally ushered in with great ceremony. Shakspeare alludes to the Wassail Bowl when he says, in his Mid– summer Night's Dream,

Sometimes lurk I in a goesip's bowl, In: very likeness of a l'P88ted crab,

And when she drinks,.against her lips I bob, And on her wither'd dewlap pour the ale.