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Strawberry Cardinal
Pick a quart of ripe, finely-flavoured strawberries, and discard all berries that are unsound or bruised. Sprinkle upon them a pound of powdered and sifted sugar, and pour over them half a bottle of Rhine wine. Cover closely, and let them stand in a cool place for half an hour. Just before they are to be served, pour over them the remainder of the wine, with another bottle, either of Moselle or of the same wine. Add a bottle of seltzer, and serve. If liked, the liquor may be strained and bottled for use.
A cold wine cup rather than a dessert — essentially a German Bowle scaled for a party. The proportions are Victorian in their sweetness, and the wine list needs translating.
- The hinge: don't over-macerateThirty minutes is the whole point. The sugar draws juice and perfume out of the berries without collapsing them; left for hours they go grey and slack and the liquid turns jammy.
- "Powdered and sifted sugar"In British books of this period powdered sugar means finely granulated — caster sugar — not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the wine. Sifting simply broke up lumps.
- A pound is a great dealSixteen ounces of sugar to a quart of fruit reflects a Victorian palate. With today's fruit and wine, taste after macerating; a third to a half of that is usually enough.
- Rhine wine and MoselleBoth mean German white wine, largely Riesling and sometimes Sylvaner: light, high in acid, moderate in alcohol. Buy a dry or off-dry Riesling, and chill everything hard. The recipe uses two bottles of wine plus one of seltzer; bottles of the period were often a little under the modern 750 ml, so the wine comes to about 1.5 litres.
- SeltzerPlain carbonated water, not a sweetened soda and not modern flavoured seltzer. Add it at the last moment or the cup goes flat before it reaches the table.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of strawberries is roughly 1.25 to 1.5 lb / 600-700 g. The finished bowl runs to about two and a half litres -- twelve to sixteen glasses. Serve in a punch bowl with a ladle, the berries floating.
- IceThe recipe asks only for a cool place and adds no ice, which would dilute it. Chill the bottles and the bowl instead; if you must use ice, a large single block is better than cubes.
- Straining and bottlingThe strained liquor keeps a day or two refrigerated, but the seltzer should go in only when it is poured. Bottling a carbonated mixture and sealing it is not a good idea.
Cardinal is the German Kardinalbowle, one of a family of chilled wine cups — Bowlen — that were fixtures of nineteenth-century summer entertaining across the Rhineland and, in time, in Britain. The name is often said to come from the deep red the fruit lends the wine, matching a cardinal's robes, though this is folk tradition and sits awkwardly with the German scheme in which Kardinal is a white-wine cup and Bischof the red; its close relations include Maibowle, scented with woodruff. Cassell's is drawing on a real German practice rather than inventing one: the insistence on Rhine wine or Moselle, both light and sharply acid, is what keeps a pound of sugar from turning the whole thing syrupy, and the seltzer added at the table is the standard finish. That such a drink sits in a general household dictionary says something about the reach of German taste in late Victorian England, where hock and Moselle were the everyday white wines of the middle-class table.