Home › The Principles of Cookery › ELDERBERRY WINE (another way)
ELDERBERRY WINE (another way)
Boil twenty-five pounds of elderberries in eleven gallons of water for one hour, and add to them an ounce of allspice and two ounces of ginger. When boiled the full time, allow four pounds of sugar to a gallon; put the sugar into a tub, and throw the boiling liquid over it, straining and pressing all the juice from the fruit. Add a quarter of a pound of cream of tartar, and let the liquid stand in the same tub for two days; then remove it to a cask, and cover the bunghole with a tile. Stir the liquid every alternate day, and fill up as it wastes. When the fermentation has ceased, close up the barrel, and when it has rested four months, bottle for use. Brandy may be added when the cask is closed. Probable cost, 3s. per gallon.
A full-scale Victorian country wine, sized for a household with a cask and a cellar. The method is sound in outline, but the quantities, the vessels and the reliance on wild yeast all need translating.
- Scale down firstTwenty-five pounds of fruit and eleven gallons of water makes a cask-sized batch most kitchens cannot house. The ratio is about 2¼ lb of berries per gallon of water; divide by ten for a manageable batch of just over a gallon (2½ lb fruit, 4 lb sugar per gallon of must).
- Which gallonCassell's is British, so these are imperial gallons of 160 fl oz — about 4.5 litres, a fifth larger than the US gallon. Getting this wrong throws the sugar-to-liquid ratio out badly.
- Strip the stemsUse only ripe black berries, pulled from the green stalks and umbels with a fork. Elder stems, leaves and unripe fruit carry cyanogenic compounds; the hour-long boil deals with the berries themselves, but there is no reason to put woody material in the pot.
- Four pounds of sugar is a lotThat is a starting gravity high enough to stall a fermentation or, if it finishes, to give a sweet wine near 14-15% alcohol. Three pounds per gallon gives a drier, more reliable result; measure with a hydrometer rather than trusting the weight.
- Add a yeastThe recipe assumes wild yeast from the fruit and the tub, which after an hour's boiling is largely gone. Pitch a sachet of wine yeast once the must has cooled below 80F, or the two days in the open tub will produce more acetic bacteria than alcohol.
- Cream of tartarA quarter pound in eleven gallons — potassium bitartrate, sold today in small jars for baking. Here it is acting as an acidifier. Modern practice would use citric or tartaric acid to a measured pH of about 3.4.
- The tile over the bungholeThis is a primitive airlock: it lets carbon dioxide escape while keeping insects out. A proper fermentation lock, or a demijohn with a bung, does the job better and without air contact.
- Timing and spiceAn ounce of allspice and two of ginger across eleven gallons is a light background warmth, not a mulled-wine dose. The four months' rest before bottling is a realistic minimum; elderberry wine is tannic and harsh young, and a year in bottle improves it considerably.
- The brandyFortifying at the close of fermentation raises the alcohol towards the point where stray yeast and bacteria are suppressed, which may be why the instruction sits there. The recipe gives no quantity.
Elder grew in every English hedge and churchyard, and elderberry wine was among the most widespread of the home-made "country wines" — and useful enough that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wine merchants were repeatedly accused of adding elderberry juice to thin port. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, prints several versions of the drink. Warmed with sugar and spice it was a familiar cold-weather drink offered to callers and carol singers. The costing of three shillings a gallon is a reminder of the economics behind it — the fruit was free for the picking, and much of the expense was sugar.