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WELSH NECTAR (a pleasant summer beverage)
Cut the peel of three lemons very thin, and put the rind into a jar with the strained juice, two pounds of loaf sugar, and a pound of raisins stoned and chopped small. Pour upon these ingredients two gallons of water which has been boiled and allowed to cool. Stir the liquor daily for five days, strain it through a jelly-bag, bottle it, and tie down the cork. It will be fit for use in ten days or a fortnight. Time, five days to make the nectar. Probable cost, 1s. per gallon. Sufficient to make two gallons.
A lightly fermented raisin-and-lemon drink of the old "country wine" type, made without added yeast and drunk young. The whole thing turns on the raisins, which carry the wild yeast that does the work.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight — two pounds is about 4 1/2 cups.
- Raisins are the yeastNothing in the recipe supplies yeast, so fermentation depends on wild yeasts, most likely carried on the raisin skins, with some contribution from the lemon peel and the air. Modern raisins are often treated with sulphur dioxide or coated with oil, both of which suppress wild yeast; unsulphured, uncoated raisins give a better chance of the drink starting at all.
- "Stoned" raisinsNineteenth-century raisins came with seeds in and had to be pitted by hand. Supermarket raisins are already seedless; chop them small so the sugars and yeast come out readily.
- Zest, not pith"Peel very thin" means the coloured zest only. Any white pith carried over turns the finished drink bitter over the two weeks it sits.
- Cooled boiled waterBoiling killed competing organisms in the household's tap or well water, and cooling it protected the yeast. The step is still worth doing; add the water at room temperature, never warm.
- Jelly-bagA jelly-bag is a fine cloth cone for straining without pressing. A double layer of muslin in a sieve does the same job — let it drip rather than squeezing, or the nectar goes cloudy.
- Bottle pressureThis is the point the original glosses over. Fermentation continues in the bottle, and "tie down the cork" was a way of holding it against rising gas. Use bottles built for pressure — swing-top or Champagne-style with a wired cork — never screw-top wine bottles or repurposed glass jars, and keep them somewhere cool where a burst would do no harm.
- Alcohol and keepingTwo pounds of sugar in two gallons ferments out to something very weak, closer to a small beer than a wine, and it was meant to be drunk within weeks rather than cellared. Once the ten days to a fortnight are up, keep it refrigerated and use it quickly.
- YieldTwo gallons, about 32 half-pint glasses. Halving the whole recipe works without adjustment.
Names of this sort — nectar, cup, shrub, negus — covered a broad family of homemade summer drinks that occupied the ground between lemonade and wine, and "Welsh" is often said to have attached itself to a good many thrifty English dishes made from cheap materials, as in Welsh rabbit, without implying much about Wales, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. Raisin-and-lemon fermentations were a staple of the British domestic wine tradition, useful because both ingredients kept in the store cupboard year-round, unlike the soft fruit that limited most country wines to their season. Cassell's places this in a period when fresh citrus and imported dried fruit had become affordable to middle-class households and home brewing remained common, so a book of this kind still expected the cook to make her own beverages. The costing of a shilling a gallon is the point of the entry: it was cheap, and it stretched three lemons across two gallons of drink.