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Wine, Beetroot, Red
Bruise six quarts of ripe sloes (the fruit of the blackthorn) in a stone mortar, breaking the stones, boil them twenty minutes in two quarts of soft water strain the liquor, and pour it into a stone jar. Scrub well with a soft brush and wash thirty pounds of purple beetroots, but on no account cut or break the skins, and boil them slowly till tender. When cold, peel and slice them into a tub, pour on them the sloe liquor, cover them up, and the following day add the rinds of three lemons and four Seville oranges, and twelve pounds of Smyrna raisins cut in halves. Boil for three-quarters of an hour twenty-six pounds of strong moist sugar with nine gallons and a half of soft water, skimming it well, and pour it hot into the tub upon the sliced beetroots, etc.; stir well, and when lukewarm work it well with eight table-spoonfuls of strong yeast, cover it up, and let it remain three days; then strain the liquor, and filter it into the cask, filling to the bung. Let it work out, and when the fermentation is over, put to the wine six ounces of sugar-candy and a quart of French brandy. Then stop it up for a month, rack it off, filter the lees, and put all again into the cask with an ounce of the best isinglass dissolved, and two ounces of bitter almonds blanched and slit. Secure the bung, and let the wine stand eighteen months; then bottle it, seal the corks, and keep it a year longer. This is a nice light wine, and has frequently been introduced as claret. It improves greatly with age.
This is a Victorian country wine on a farmhouse scale — roughly eleven gallons in the cask — and two of its steps put it outside what can be recommended today. The notes below explain the recipe rather than adapt it.
- Bitter almondsThe two ounces of blanched, slit bitter almonds added at racking are the fatal detail. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which breaks down in contact with moisture and enzymes to release hydrogen cyanide; steeping them in a liquid that is then drunk by the glass is exactly the exposure route that makes them dangerous. They are restricted or hard to obtain as a food ingredient in a number of countries for this reason.
- Deliberately broken sloe stonesThe instruction to bruise the sloes "breaking the stones" is not incidental. Blackthorn kernels, like those of plums and cherries, are cyanogenic, and crushing them before a twenty-minute boil extracts that almond flavour. Modern sloe recipes prick or freeze the fruit to break the skin and release the juice, and leave the stones whole.
- Why the two together matterBoth additions supply the same noyau or almond note, and both contribute to the toxic load in the finished bottle. There is no way to judge the dose from the text, and the almonds go in cold at racking, after fermentation, with no further heating.
- Reading the quantitiesFor context rather than use: thirty pounds of beetroot and twenty-six pounds of "strong moist sugar" (unrefined soft brown sugar) to nine and a half gallons of soft water is a big, sweet, high-alcohol must. Isinglass is a fish-derived fining agent, still sold for beer and wine; sugar-candy is simply crystallised sugar, added here after the fermentation is declared over.
- Smyrna raisins and Seville rindsSmyrna raisins are sultana-type raisins from the Aegean, added for body and sugar. Seville oranges are the bitter marmalade orange, in season only in midwinter; the rinds and the lemon peel supply aromatic bitterness.
- If you want a beetroot wineUse a current home-winemaking recipe with measured pectic enzyme, campden tablets, a cultured wine yeast and a hydrometer. Do not carry over the almonds or the crushed stones from this one.
Country wines like this belonged to the English farmhouse and the large private house, where a cask that had to sit two and a half years before drinking was a perfectly reasonable proposition. Beetroot was prized for it because it gave depth of colour — hence the frank boast that the wine "has frequently been introduced as claret," a common ambition in a period when imported Bordeaux carried duty and prestige in equal measure. The sloe liquor supplies astringency and the almonds a noyau note; the whole assembly is an exercise in building a familiar taste out of hedgerow and kitchen-garden material. Bitter almonds were an ordinary flavouring in nineteenth-century British kitchens, used in ratafias, blancmanges and cordials, and their danger was understood only loosely — poisoning cases from almond-flavoured drinks appear in the medical literature of the era, and they gradually disappeared from domestic recipes over the following century.