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RHUBARB WINE (another way) (Take three pounds of sliced)
Take three pounds of sliced rhubarb, one ounce of cardamom-seeds, bruised, half an ounce of bruised ginger, and a pint and a half of any desired spirit. Digest for three days, and then add of any white wine, two gallons.
This is not a fermented country wine but an infusion: rhubarb and spices steeped in spirit, then let down with white wine. The proportions are generous and the vocabulary is pharmaceutical.
- "Digest" means macerateDigestion in old recipe and pharmacy language means steeping in a covered vessel, often in gentle warmth, rather than boiling. The recipe gives no temperature; three days in a sealed jar at room temperature will do, shaken once a day.
- Stalks only"Sliced rhubarb" means the stalks. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are never used in food or drink — trim and discard them before weighing.
- The unspecified spirit"Any desired spirit" leaves the choice open; brandy or a plain grain spirit would be the likely household options, and spirits of the period were often sold stronger than the modern 40% bottling. Brandy or a neutral vodka is the closest match.
- Cardamom seeds, not podsAn ounce of bruised cardamom seeds is the weight of the seeds alone, roughly the yield of an ounce and a half of whole green pods. Crack the pods and use the black seeds inside.
- QuantitiesA pint and a half is 30 fl oz in imperial measure (about 850 ml); two imperial gallons is about 9 litres. The finished volume is a little over two gallons, so scale down hard unless you have a demijohn to hand — a tenth of the recipe makes about a litre, or a bottle and a third.
- No sugar is givenUnlike true rhubarb wine, nothing here is sweetened or fermented, so the result is tart and spirituous. Sweeten to taste with sugar syrup after straining if you want it to read as a cordial rather than a bitter aperitif.
- Strain and restStrain through muslin after the three days and again after settling; rhubarb throws a fine sediment. It is drinkable at once but the cardamom and ginger integrate over a month or two in a cool, dark place.
- StrengthWith roughly 850 ml of spirit in 9 litres of wine, the finished drink lands a few degrees above the wine you started with — somewhere near a fortified wine. Serve it in small glasses.
Cassell's places this among a run of homemade wines and cordials, the kind of thing a nineteenth-century household turned out from whatever the garden gave in quantity, and rhubarb gave in quantity every spring. The word "digest" and the careful weighing of bruised cardamom and ginger betray the recipe's ancestry in the apothecary's shop rather than the kitchen: rhubarb root had a long career as a purgative in European and Chinese medicine, and spiced rhubarb preparations sat on the boundary between tonic and treat. The stalks themselves only became a common food in Britain in the early nineteenth century, and the fashion for forcing them under pots to get pale early stems belongs to the same decades. Note that this version ferments nothing ified wine rather than a true fermented one.