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Dandelion Wine
Get four quarts of the yellow petals of the dandelion, and pour over them into a tub one gallon of warm water that has previously been boiled. Stir it well round, and cover with a blanket, to stand three days, during which time it should be stirred frequently. Strain off the flowers from the liquid, and boil it for half an hour, with the rind of a lemon, the rind of an orange, a little ginger, and three and a half pounds of lump sugar to each gallon; add the sugar and lemon, from which the rinds were removed, in slices to the boiling liquor, and when cool ferment with yeast on a slice of toast. When it has stood a day or two put it into a cask, and in two months bottle. This wine is said to be specially adapted to all persons suffering from liver complaints.
A straightforward country wine, but the original assumes a cool cellar, a wooden cask and a brewer's instincts. A few points bring it into line with modern practice.
- Four quarts of petalsThat is a dry measure of loose yellow petals, lightly packed — roughly a gallon jug filled with them, which takes several hundred flowers. Pick on a dry sunny day when the heads are fully open, and pull the yellow petals free of the green base; the sepals and stems carry the bitter milky sap.
- The hinge: keep the green outEvery point of quality in dandelion wine turns on how cleanly the petals are separated from the calyx. Green material gives a rank, grassy bitterness that no amount of ageing removes.
- Sugar and strengthThree and a half pounds of lump sugar per gallon is about 1.6 kg — a very high-gravity must, with more sugar than most yeasts will ferment out, so expect a strong wine that finishes with noticeable residual sweetness. Lump sugar was simply refined loaf sugar; ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent.
- Yeast on toastThe toast was a raft to float baker's or brewer's yeast on the surface of the cooling liquor. A sachet of wine yeast stirred in once the must is below 25C/77F does the same job far more reliably, and will not carry bread flavours.
- "A little ginger"Genuinely unspecified. Recipes of this kind commonly call for somewhere between half an ounce and an ounce of bruised dried root per gallon; treat it as seasoning and judge by taste.
- Cask, or notA modern demijohn with an airlock replaces the cask and does the job better, since the open three-day flower steep and the transfer are the two points where spoilage organisms and vinegar flies get in. Sanitise everything that touches the liquid after the boil.
- TimingTwo months to bottling is optimistic unless fermentation is genuinely finished — bottle a still-fermenting wine and the bottles may burst. Wait until the airlock has been silent for two weeks and the wine has dropped clear; a year in bottle improves it considerably.
- The liver claimDandelion's reputation as a liver and kidney remedy is folk medicine, not medicine. Read the last sentence as period advertising.
- YieldOne gallon of water plus the sugar gives a little over a gallon of finished wine — about six 75 cl bottles.
Dandelion wine belongs to the long English tradition of country or "cottage" wines, made from whatever flower, leaf or root came free in spring: cowslip, elderflower, birch sap, parsnip, rhubarb. Grapes would not ripen reliably in Britain and imported wine was taxed, so households fermented sugar-and-water musts flavoured with garden and hedgerow material — which is exactly the structure of this recipe, where the petals and the citrus rinds supply aroma and the sugar supplies everything else. This was thrift and seasonal husbandry as much as cookery, made at the one moment in April or May when the meadows are solid yellow. The medicinal note at the end echoes the plant's older herbal reputation as a diuretic and bitter tonic — its French name pissenlit makes the same point less delicately — and such claims were traditional rather than tested.