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Currant Wine, White
White currant wine may be made in the same way as red, with two ounces of bruised bitter almonds mixed in the fermenting liquor.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe — it directs the reader back to the red currant wine method and adds one ingredient. That one addition is the reason it cannot be followed.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what "bruised" and steeped in a fermenting liquid accomplishes. Two ounces is roughly 55 g of kernels, a quantity in the range associated with poisoning in adults; some hydrogen cyanide would be carried off with the fermentation gas, but how much remains in the finished wine is not something you can predict or measure at home.
- They are not the same as sweet almondsThe bitter almond of Victorian grocers was a distinct variety, sold for flavouring. Substituting supermarket (sweet) almonds gives none of the intended aroma; almond extract is the modern stand-in, and unprocessed bitter kernels are now restricted or hard to buy in many countries.
- No heat step to fall back onUnlike a baked almond macaroon, where volatile compounds are partly driven off by heat, this is an unheated ferment. The almond matter stays in prolonged contact with water and yeast, conditions that promote enzymatic breakdown of amygdalin; some of the liberated cyanide will escape with the fermentation gas, but there is no step here designed to remove it.
- The base wine is also underspecifiedEven setting the almonds aside, the parent red currant recipe assumes the reader already knows the fermentation practice of the period, and gives none of the controls a modern winemaker would expect. If you want to make white currant wine, work from a current home-winemaking recipe with measured quantities.
- White currants themselvesWhite currants are a pale, anthocyanin-free cultivar of the red currant, milder and slightly sweeter, and were a common kitchen-garden fruit. They are rare in shops now; look for them at pick-your-own fruit farms in midsummer.
Currant wine was one of the staple English "country wines" — fruit ferments made at home by households with a heavy summer crop to use up and no ready access to imported grape wine. Bitter almonds and their close relatives, peach and apricot kernels, appear throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century confectionery and cordial recipes — the noyau cordials are the obvious example — for their marzipan aroma, which comes from benzaldehyde. Their toxicity was known but treated as a matter of dose rather than prohibition, and restrictions on selling the kernels came later, which is why a line like this one could sit unremarked in a household cookery book and is unusable today.