Mead "pyment". Mulled mead is a popular drink at Christmas time, where mead is flavored with spices (and sometimes various fruits) and warmed, traditionally by having a hot poker plunged into it. Some meads retain some measure of the sweetness of the original honey, and some may even be considered as dessert wines. Drier meads are also available, and some producers offer sparkling meads. There are faux-meads, which are actually wines with honey added after fermentation as a sweetener and flavoring. Historically, meads were fermented with wild yeasts and bacteria (as noted in the recipe quoted above) residing on the skins
The Third Ingredient The Third Ingredient "The Third Ingredient" is a short story by O. Henry, notable for its ironic take on the "Stone Soup" theme. The story was originally published in 1908 in "Everybody's Magazine" with illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele. The next year it was included in O. Henry's collection "Options". As reported by O. Henry's good friend and biographer C. Alphonso Smith, "The Third Ingredient" was inspired by a real experience: ... in one of his first months in New York he was living in very humble lodgings and one evening found him without funds. He became so hungry that