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Sloe Gin
Chop a quarter of an ounce of bitter almonds very fine, and crush three-quarters of a pound of sugar candy. Take two pounds of sloes, which should be bruised or pricked all over, a quart of Old Tom gin, and a quarter of a pound of sugar. Put all these ingredients into a small cask, stir very thoroughly, and in three months' time strain until quite clear, and bottle. Probable cost, 5s.
The problem here is the first ingredient, not the technique. Bitter almonds carry amygdalin, which yields hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted, and this recipe crushes them fine and then leaves them in liquid for three months.
- Bitter almonds are the hazardBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted, and a quarter of an ounce, roughly seven nuts, is steeped here in a single quart of spirit with no cooking step. The United States prohibits the sale of unprocessed bitter almonds. Victorian cooks used them freely as a cheap almond flavouring and had no way to gauge the dose.
- Three months makes it worse, not betterLong maceration is what the recipe relies on for flavour, and it also leaves the crushed nuts in contact with the liquid for months in a closed vessel. There is no cooking step, no heat, and nothing that would drive off the volatile product. If you want sloe gin, use a current recipe.
- Old Tom ginA lightly sweetened, fuller-bodied gin style that had largely disappeared by the mid-twentieth century and has been revived by a number of distillers since the 2000s. It is not interchangeable with London dry.
- Sugar candyNot confectionery but large crystallised sugar, grown slowly on strings or sticks and sold in lumps that had to be crushed. Ordinary granulated or preserving sugar is the modern equivalent; the recipe's total sweetening is a pound in a quart, which is generous even by cordial standards.
- "Bruised or pricked all over"Sloes are tough-skinned and need the skin broken before the spirit can draw out colour and flavour. Traditional practice waited for the first frost to split them, or pricked each fruit with a fork or a blackthorn spine.
- Probable costFive shillings, quoted as a guide to the household budget. Cassell's costed most of its entries this way.
Sloe gin belongs to a long English tradition of turning hedgerow fruit into spirit-based cordials, and the sloe, the fruit of the blackthorn, is one of the few wild fruits too astringent to eat but well suited to steeping. The practice is often linked to the enclosure hedges of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when blackthorn was planted in quantity as stock-proof fencing and the autumn crop was there for the taking, though the link is traditional rather than documented. The addition of bitter almonds reflects a Victorian taste for the marzipan note in fruit liqueurs, a flavour then produced by bitter almond, peach kernel or laurel water. Almond flavouring based on manufactured benzaldehyde later displaced the nuts themselves in domestic recipes.