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Sloe Wine
Procure sloes which are sound and ripe. Look them carefully over, and reject all that are bruised and decayed. Pick off the stalks, put the sloes into a large pan, and pour a gallon of boiling water upon every gallon of sloes. Let them soak for five days, stirring them well every day. Put four pounds of good loaf sugar to each gallon of liquor, and when it is dissolved, put the whole into a cask with a pint of spirit to each gallon and a half of liquor. If the wine is allowed to remain in the cask for a considerable length of time it will become almost equal to port. Time to keep the wine in the cask, at least twelve months.
SLY BREAD, OR BREAD FRITTERS (an economical and excellent sweet dish). Beat three eggs without frothing them; sweeten, and flavour them with lemon-rind, orange-flower or rose-water, or any other flavouring, and add a table-spoonful of good brandy or rum. Cut some stale crumb of bread into slices the third of an inch thick, stamp them into small fancy shapes with a cutter, put them into the mixture, and let them soak till they have absorbed as much of the eggs as possible. Lift them up carefully with a slice, and fry them in hot fat just as pancakes or fritters are fried. Pile them on a dish, sprinkle powdered white sugar thickly over them, and serve very hot. Few persons at first sight would suspect the composition of this dish, which is simple and good. It may be varied by taking slices of common cake with currants and raisins instead of bread; or, if liked, the bread may first be soaked in milk, and afterwards dipped in the egg batter. Time to fry, about five minutes.
Two recipes run together here: a country fruit wine measured by the gallon, and a thrifty fritter that is French toast under another name. Both are workable, but the wine assumes a cooper's cask and a cellar you can forget about for a year.
- Gallons are imperialAn imperial gallon is 4.55 litres, about 1.2 US gallons; a pint is 20 fl oz, not 16. Work in one system throughout so the proportions stay as written.
- A gallon of sloes is a volume of fruitMeasured loose in a pail rather than weighed, roughly 6 to 7 lb of berries. The recipe is genuinely approximate on this point, and that is normal for country wines.
- Loaf sugarSold as hard refined cones to be broken and crushed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight.
- Do not seal the cask tightThere is no added yeast here: fermentation comes from wild yeasts on the fruit skins and takes off once the sugar goes in. A closed vessel with no airlock or loose bung builds pressure and can split. Modern practice is a fermentation lock, and a cultured wine yeast if you want a predictable result.
- The spirit is a fortification, not a preservative shortcutA pint of brandy to a gallon and a half of liquor adds roughly three per cent alcohol to the finished wine, which is the direction the comparison to port is pointing. Many modern winemakers prefer to add the spirit after fermentation has finished.
- Sloes need frost, or timeBlackthorn fruit picked green is punishingly astringent and low in sugar. Pick after the first frosts, or freeze the berries overnight, which splits the skins and helps the five-day infusion draw colour and flavour.
- Twelve months means twelve monthsThe tannin in sloes is aggressive and young sloe wine tastes of ink. The long cask time is doing real work, not being decorative.
- For the frittersFry in fat at about 350-375F; five minutes total, turning once, suits pieces cut a third of an inch thick. Serve straight from the pan, as instructed, since they collapse as they cool.
Sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn, Prunus spinosa, a hedgerow shrub of British and northern European field boundaries, and they were free food at a time when hedgerows were still laid and gathered from. Almost unswallowable raw, they were put to use in gin, in cordials, in preserves, and as here in a fortified wine whose ambition is stated plainly: to pass for port. That ambition tells you a good deal about nineteenth-century household economy, when duty-paid Iberian wine was a purchase and a cask in the cellar was labour. The second recipe belongs to the same instinct. "Sly bread" is stale crumb disguised, a cousin of French pain perdu and of the dish English cookery long called poor knights of Windsor, and the author is quietly pleased that few persons would suspect the composition. Stamping the slices into fancy shapes with a cutter before they soak is the whole trick of the disguise.