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Parsnip Wine, a Simple Way of Making
Take eighteen pounds of parsnips, and ten gallons of water. Boil the parsnips in the water till they are quite soft, then strain and squeeze out the liquor, and to every gallon add three pounds of lump sugar. Boil for three-quarters of an hour, and when cool, ferment with a little yeast on a slice of toast. Let the liquid stand ten days in a tub, stirring every day. At the end of that time put it into a cask. The parsnip wine will be fit for bottling in six or seven months.
A country wine on a farmhouse scale: ten gallons is roughly fifty standard bottles. The method is sound, but a few of the old assumptions need translating before you start.
- Scale it down firstEighteen pounds of parsnips to ten gallons of water needs a very large boiling vessel and a 10-gallon cask. Divide by five for a workable batch: about 3 lb 10 oz parsnips, 2 gallons water, 6 lb sugar.
- Lump sugarLump sugar was refined white sugar sold in cut blocks. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the same thing. Three pounds per gallon is a very strong must -- more sugar than most yeasts will ferment out, so expect a high-alcohol wine that may well stop short of dry and keep some sweetness.
- Yeast on toastThe toast was a float to keep the yeast on the surface of the liquid, and the yeast itself was baker's or brewer's barm. A sachet of dried wine yeast, rehydrated and pitched when the must is below 75F, is far more reliable and will not carry bread bacteria into the batch.
- Do not pitch hot"When cool" means genuinely cool - under 80F, ideally 70F. Yeast pitched into warm must is killed or stressed, and a stuck ferment in ten gallons of sugar water spoils quickly.
- The hinge: sanitationBoiled must and sugar syrup are an ideal medium for acetobacter and wild yeast. Every tub, spoon, funnel and cask must be sanitised, and the open ten-day stage should be covered with a cloth rather than left to the air of a Victorian scullery.
- Cut the parsnips, don't mash themBoil them sliced until soft but no further, and strain gently. Heavy squeezing pushes starch and pulp into the liquor and gives a permanent haze that no amount of time in bottle will clear.
- Acid and tanninParsnips contribute almost no acid, and a flat, flabby wine is the usual result of following the old recipes literally. Modern country-wine practice adds citric or tartaric acid and a little tannin or strong black tea to the must; the domestic cook of the book's period had no practical way of measuring either.
- The cask stageA demijohn with an airlock does the work of the cask. Fill to the shoulder, fit the airlock, and leave it until fermentation has finished and the wine has dropped clear before racking. Six or seven months to bottling is realistic — parsnip wine is notoriously slow to clear and better still after a year.
- Bottle only when dryBottle before fermentation is complete and the residual sugar will restart in the bottle. Check with a hydrometer for a stable reading over two weeks rather than trusting the calendar.
Parsnip was one of the great English root wines, made in households that grew far more of the crop than they could eat before it went woody in spring. Parsnips store poorly once the weather warms, and their sugars concentrate after frost, so a February or March glut was routinely turned into wine -- the same logic that produced beetroot, carrot and mangold wines in the same books. Cassell's places this among the domestic wines and cordials because a Victorian household of any size was expected to produce its own drink as a matter of thrift, not hobby. The "yeast on a slice of toast" is the older barm technique, inherited from brewing, where a scrap of toast floats the leaven on the surface of the wort. It survives in recipe books long after purpose-sold yeast was available, which suggests how conservative the practice was in country kitchens.