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Parsnip Wine
This beverage is highly spoken of by those who are accustomed to home-made wines. Clean, and carefully remove any spongy or decayed portions from the roots, quarter them, and cut them into pieces about four inches long. After they are thus prepared, weigh them, and boil them, allowing four or five pounds of the roots to each gallon of water. When they are tender, without being pulpy, leave the lid off the copper for a short time, to allow the escape of the strong aromatic odour which will arise, then strain the liquid through a hair sieve into a tub, and be careful in doing so not to bruise the roots. Add immediately half an ounce of powdered white argol (a bi-tartrate of potassium, procurable at the chemist's), to each gallon of wine, and when it has been stirred a few minutes, introduce three pounds of loaf sugar, and stir again until the latter is dissolved. Leave the liquid uncovered until it is almost cold, that is, until it is reduced to a temperature of eighty-five degrees. Cut a thick round of bread from a half-quartern loaf, toast it, and moisten it with fresh yeast (two table-spoonfuls will be sufficient for six gallons of wine); put this into the liquid, cover with a flannel the vessel which contains it, and stir it every day until the fermentation subsides. The vessel should be kept in a room or cellar where from fifty to fifty-five degrees may be kept up, and the yeast should be skimmed off as it forms. In ten days or a fortnight the wine may be turned into the cask. If a sweet wine is wanted the barrel should be filled to the bung and left for a few days; them as it overflows it should be filled up with a small quantity of the liquid, which has been preserved for the purpose. When it is quiet, the hole may be covered with a piece of brown paper, and if that remains unmoved for a week the cask may be loosely bunged down, and in a day or two, when the "fretting" is quite over, made tight. This wine may be racked off in six months, but should not be bottled for at least a year. When a dry wine is wanted, leave the liquid in the open vessel until all the beer yeast has risen and been skimmed off, then put it into the cask, and leave an inch or two of space in the barrel; frequently stir in the yeasty froth, and to prevent the liquor escaping cover it with a slate. Skim the liquor thoroughly before securing it, and be careful not to fill up the cask until the wine is quite tranquil. Time to ferment the liquid, ten or fourteen days, until the fermentation subsides. Probable cost, 1s. 10d. per gallon.
A full-scale English country wine, written for someone with a copper, a tub and a cask. The proportions are all given per gallon, so it scales down cleanly to a demijohn.
- The hinge: do not cook the roots to mushBoil the parsnips only until a knife goes in, and strain without pressing or stirring the pieces. Pulped parsnip releases starch and pectin that give a permanent haze no amount of racking will clear.
- Quantities per gallonFour to five pounds of prepared root, half an ounce of argol and three pounds of sugar to each gallon of water. Three pounds of sugar per gallon is a sweet, strong wine, with potential alcohol of fifteen per cent or more -- more than the yeast is likely to finish, so it will stay sweet; two pounds gives something lighter and drier.
- ArgolCrude potassium bitartrate, the deposit scraped from wine casks. Cream of tartar is the refined form of the same salt and is the direct substitute. It is there to acidify a base that has almost no natural acid of its own; without acid of some kind the ferment stalls and the finished wine tastes flat and vegetal.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones and broken up with nippers, simply refined white sugar. Ordinary granulated is the equivalent.
- The temperatures are FahrenheitPitch the yeast at 85F (29C) or below; 50 to 55F (10 to 13C) is the fermentation cellar. Both are sensible numbers still. Above about 75F a fruit or vegetable wine develops harsh, solventy flavours.
- Yeast on toastA round from a half-quartern loaf means a slice off a two-pound loaf, used purely as a raft to float brewer's yeast on the surface. A sachet of dried wine yeast, stirred in, does the same job with a far cleaner result; "beer yeast" skimmed from the top is ale yeast, which throws its own bready flavours.
- The cask, and what to use insteadEverything from "filled to the bung" onwards is a method of excluding air while carbon dioxide still escapes: brown paper as a crude one-way valve, a slate laid over the open vessel, topping up as the wine settles. A fermentation lock on a glass demijohn achieves it with less risk, and the flannel cover over the open tub should be replaced by a clean cloth or lid to keep out vinegar flies.
- Timing and yieldTen to fourteen days of vigorous ferment, racking at six months, bottling at a year. That last figure is not padding: young parsnip wine is sharp and earthy and needs the time. A six-gallon batch is about thirty-six 75cl bottles, less what is lost in racking; a single-gallon test batch is six.
- Cost1s 10d per gallon is pre-decimal money.
Parsnip was one of the standard bases of English home-made wine from the eighteenth century into the twentieth, valued for the same reason it was valued as food: it is sugary, and it gets sweeter still after frost, when cold weather converts stored starch to sugar. Cassell's places it among a run of vegetable and flower wines that belonged to a household economy in which a glut from the garden was turned into something that kept. The instructions here assume equipment now vanished from domestic kitchens: a copper, meaning the large built-in boiler used for laundry and preserving, a hair sieve, and a small cask. The detail about leaving the lid off to let "the strong aromatic odour" escape is a real piece of craft, since the volatile parsnip smell is exactly what makes a badly made batch taste of soup. Country wines of this kind faded as cheap imported grape wine became ordinary, but they survived as a home-brewing tradition and the technique described -- acidify, sugar, pitch, skim, cask, wait a year -- is recognisably the one still followed.