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Seville Orange Cordial Water
Take one handful of young green fir-tree tops, two handfuls of water-cress, the same of scurvy-grass, one pound of burdock-roots scraped and sliced, the thin rinds of twelve Seville oranges, the juice of the same, and five gallons of newly-brewed ale-wort. Beat the herbs in a mortar, and infuse all while the wort is fermenting with the yeast. When done working, stop it up, and drink occasionally when fine.
This is a small-beer recipe rather than a cordial in the modern sugar-syrup sense: a medicinal herb ale, built on five gallons of unfermented wort. Almost every element of it needs translating.
- Ale-wortThe sweet unfermented liquid drawn off after mashing malt, taken warm from the brewhouse. A modern equivalent is a five-gallon batch of light unhopped or lightly hopped wort, either mashed from pale malt or made up from malt extract, pitched with ale yeast.
- ScaleFive imperial gallons is about six US gallons, or roughly 23 litres — a full homebrew batch, not a kitchen quantity. Scaling to one gallon means dividing every herb by five: a small handful of fir tips, about three ounces of burdock, the rind and juice of two or three oranges.
- Identify the fir before you pick it"Young green fir-tree tops" means the soft new spring growth of spruce or fir. Yew, which looks superficially similar and grows in the same churchyards and hedgerows, is seriously poisonous in all its green parts. Do not gather conifer tips unless you can name the tree with certainty.
- Scurvy-grassCochlearia officinalis, a coastal brassica with a sharp mustardy bite, once grown and sold specifically for antiscorbutic ales. It is not commercially available now; watercress alone, or watercress with a handful of horseradish leaves, gives a comparable flavour, though the recipe's original point was the vitamin C.
- Burdock rootSold as gobo in Japanese and Korean groceries and increasingly in greengrocers. It browns fast once cut — slice it straight into the mortar or into acidulated water, and use it fresh rather than dried, which is a different, more bitter thing.
- Seville orangesBitter marmalade oranges, available in Britain for only a few weeks in midwinter, chiefly January into February. The thin rinds means the coloured zest only, with none of the white pith, which would turn the beer harshly bitter. Twelve Sevilles give roughly a pint to a pint and a half of very sour juice.
- "When done working"Fermentation has finished — no more visible activity, and a hydrometer reading stable over two or three days. Bottling or sealing before this point is what produces burst bottles, so wait for the stable reading rather than for the froth to subside.
- "Drink occasionally when fine"Fine means clear: the yeast and herb debris have dropped out, which takes a couple of weeks cold. The result is a resinous, bitter herb ale meant to be taken in small glasses as a tonic, not a session drink; the recipe specifies no strength, so that depends entirely on the wort used.
Herb ales of this kind sat on the border between the brewhouse and the medicine chest. Scurvy-grass and watercress were mainstays of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British antiscorbutic practice, often with fir or spruce tips alongside, and "scurvy-grass ale" is recorded as a bottled street drink in London into the 1700s, advertised as a spring purifier of the blood after a winter without green vegetables. The reasoning was sound even if the theory was not: watercress and scurvy-grass are good sources of vitamin C, and conifer tips contain some. Spruce and fir tips had a parallel reputation at sea, where spruce beer was brewed on North Atlantic voyages for the same purpose. By the time this was gathered into a late nineteenth-century cookery dictionary the medical rationale had long been superseded, and the recipe survives as an antiquarian entry.