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Unfermented Wine
Take the pure juice of well-ripened grapes, put in a porcelain kettle with about one pound of best white sugar to each gallon of juice, and let it boil gently, skimming carefully. Let it simmer slowly till it is reduced about one-fifth. Then bottle or can while hot, and you have a rich, refreshing drink. Elderberry Wine. To every quart of the berries put a quart of water and boil for half an hour. Bruise from the skin and strain, and to every gallon of juice add three pounds of double-refined sugar and one-quarter ounce of cream of tartar, and boil for half an hour. Take a clean cask and put in it one pound of raisins to every three gallons of wine, and a slice of toasted bread covered with good yeast. When the wine has become quite cool, put it into a cask and place in a room of even temperature to ferment. When this has fully ceased, put the bung in tight. No brandy or alcohol should be added.
XXV. Home-Made Inks.
A GOOD black ink may be made as follows: One gallon of soft water, one-quarter of a pound extract of logwood, twenty grains bichromate potash, fifteen grains prussiate potash. Heat the logwood and water to a boiling point and skim well. Dissolve the potash in one-half a pint of hot water and put all together, stirring well. Boil three minutes; strain and it is fit for use. A few cloves put in each bottle will prevent it from molding.
Three separate items have been run together under one heading here: a boiled grape juice, a fermented elderberry wine, and a black writing ink. None of the three should be followed as printed, and the reasons differ.
- The hinge: no processing instructions"Bottle or can while hot" was the whole of the preservation method given. There is no jar type, no headspace, no water-bath time and no temperature, so there is no way to know whether the seal or the heat load is adequate. Grape juice is acidic enough that this often worked, but a current tested canning procedure is what this needs.
- Elderberry stems and unripe fruitRaw elderberries, and especially the green stems, leaves and unripe berries, contain cyanogenic glycosides and cause vomiting and diarrhoea. The half-hour boil here is meant to deal with that, but the recipe never says to strip the fruit from the stems before boiling, and "bruise from the skin and strain" comes after.
- Open-cask fermentationA slice of toast smeared with bakers' yeast, floated in an open cask in a room of even temperature, is an invitation to acetic bacteria and wild moulds. Modern winemaking uses a sealed vessel with an airlock and a measured yeast strain for exactly this reason.
- The ink is not food and is genuinely poisonousBichromate of potash is potassium dichromate, a hexavalent chromium compound: corrosive, a recognised carcinogen and toxic by ingestion and skin contact. Prussiate of potash is a potassium cyanide-complex salt -- ferrocyanide or ferricyanide, depending on the grade meant. Neither belongs in a kitchen kettle, and the recipe gives no ventilation or disposal guidance.
- Reading the old termsA "porcelain kettle" is an enamelled saucepan, specified because iron and copper discolour fruit juice. "Double-refined sugar" is ordinary white granulated sugar; the phrase distinguished it from the darker, less pure grades then sold alongside it. The "bung" is the wooden stopper in the cask's filling hole.
- Cream of tartar's roleA quarter ounce per gallon is about two teaspoons. In elderberry wine it acidifies a low-acid fruit, which both improves the flavour and gives the yeast a working pH; elderberries have far less natural acid than grapes.
- Yield of the grape juiceA gallon of juice reduced by a fifth gives a little over three quarts of a sweet, concentrated drink, near enough to be diluted with water or soda in the glass rather than drunk neat.
"Unfermented wine" is a temperance phrase, and its appearance in a household economy chapter is a small piece of nineteenth-century social history. The method of heating grape juice so that it would keep without turning to alcohol is generally credited to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a New Jersey dentist and Methodist communion steward who began bottling pasteurised juice in 1869 for churches that objected to serving wine at the Lord's Supper. By 1900 the idea had spread well beyond communion tables into ordinary kitchens, where a boiled, sugared grape syrup was simply a good cold drink. That the compiler puts a fully alcoholic elderberry wine directly beneath it, with the pointed instruction that "no brandy or alcohol should be added," says a good deal about where this book draws the line: distilled spirits were the enemy, a homemade fruit wine was housekeeping.