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SHERRY, BRITISH (Robinson's recipe)
Mix well eleven gallons of river water with thirty-five pounds of strong moist sugar, the whites of twelve eggs well beaten, and six pounds of honey, and boil them slowly for nearly two hours, skimming until the liquor is clear and bright. Pour it boiling hot upon a peck of the young shoots and buds of the sweetbrier, the thin peels of ten Seville oranges and their juice, and ten ounces of gum arabie. Stir it well half an hour, and when at the proper temperature work it with fresh yeast, and let it remain four or five days; then strain it into the cask upon two quarts of the pure juice of Lisbon grapes, ten ounces of sugar-candy broken small, and an ounce of bitter almonds blanched and beaten fine. Keep the bung out as long as the fermentation continues, and the vessel completely filled, and when it is quiet take the scum off the surface, add three pints of French brandy, and stop it up safely for two years or more; then bottle it, and keep it eighteen months longer, when it will be excellent.
This is a recipe for an imitation sherry made by fermenting sugar, honey and flavourings for several years. Two of its ingredients put it beyond use in a modern kitchen, and the scale and method compound the problem.
- Bitter almondsAn ounce of blanched and beaten bitter almonds is added to the cask. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted, and here it is crushed into a liquid that will never be heated again. An ounce is roughly twenty-five to thirty nuts; it is dispersed through eleven gallons, but nothing in the process drives the cyanide off, and the drink is then stored for years. Raw bitter almonds are for this reason not sold for eating in Britain or the United States.
- Eleven gallons of river waterUntreated surface water is the base of the whole batch. It is boiled with the sugar and egg white, but it is then poured over raw botanicals and fermented cool for years; a modern reader has no way to know what agricultural or industrial run-off the source carries. Nothing in the process removes metals or nitrates.
- Sweetbrier shoots by the peckA peck is about two dry gallons, here of young shoots and buds of Rosa rubiginosa. Sweetbriar is not itself known to be poisonous, but gathering hedgerow greenery in that quantity for a drink depends entirely on the identification being right.
- No measured temperature anywhere"When at the proper temperature work it with fresh yeast" is the only pitching instruction. Without a figure, a modern cook cannot judge whether the must is warm enough to kill the yeast or cool enough to invite a spoilage culture into eleven gallons of sugar water.
- Open cask, years of storageThe bung is left out through fermentation and the surface scum skimmed by hand, then the vessel is stopped for two years or more. This is a long unsanitised anaerobic hold in wood, with no acidity or specific-gravity check to confirm the fermentation ever finished. A stuck ferment sealed in a cask is both a spoilage and a pressure risk.
- If you want the drinkCountry wines and sherry-style fortified wines are still made at home, but use a current recipe with measured sanitation, pitching temperatures and gravity readings. Do not adapt this one.
"British sherry" belongs to a long nineteenth-century tradition of home-made wines built to imitate expensive imports: sugar and honey supplied the alcohol, and flavourings stood in for the character of the real thing. Here the Seville orange peel and juice give acidity and bitterness, gum arabic and sugar-candy give body and sweetness, bitter almonds are presumably meant to suggest the nutty note often associated with aged sherry, and a small charge of grape juice and French brandy lends respectability to a wine with almost no grape in it. Cassell's carried such recipes because a Victorian household that could not afford duty-paid Spanish wine could still fill a cask from the garden and the grocer's sugar barrel. The instruction to keep the wine three and a half years before drinking is a reminder that these were long domestic projects, laid down in the expectation that the same family would still be in the same house to open them.