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Wine, Bitter
Take a quart each of red and green camomile, and bruise them with a pint of wormwood, all being picked nicely from the stalks; lay them in a vessel, and add two ounces of camomile flowers, a handful of rosemary, and an ounce of gentian root. Boil for half an hour four gallons of soft water with ten pounds of good loaf sugar, two ounces of ginger bruised, and the whites of four eggs well beaten, skimming till quite clear. Pour the liquid scalding on the herbs, cover up close, and let them infuse for four days. At the end of that the time warm a part of the liquor, mix it with the rest, and work it with yeast; strain it into a small cask, and on fermentation ceasing, add an ounce of dissolved isinglass and a pint of brandy; stop up the bung, and keep the wine for nine months; then bottle in pint bottles, seal the corks, and keep for six months longer.
This is a domestic tonic wine of the sort brewed by the gallon in Victorian still-rooms, and the reason it cannot be reproduced is in the second line: the sheer bulk of wormwood. The notes below explain the recipe's terms and where it goes wrong.
- The wormwood is the problemA bruised pint of Artemisia absinthium steeped into four gallons is a pharmacological dose, not a flavouring. Wormwood's essential oil contains thujone, a convulsant and neurotoxin; commercial vermouths and bitters use it in trace amounts under legal thujone limits precisely because uncontrolled infusions are not safe to drink by the tumblerful. Nothing in this method measures or limits the extraction.
- Gentian and long infusionAn ounce of gentian root, infused in scalding liquor for four days and then held for months in cask, gives a very concentrated bitter extract. Gentian in quantity can irritate the stomach, and here it adds to an already heavy herbal load.
- "Red and green camomile" is not identifiableNineteenth-century garden names for chamomile-like composites were used loosely and may have covered more than one plant, some of them irritant. Two quarts of unspecified bruised herb cannot be substituted for with any confidence.
- No dose, no strength, no controlThe recipe gives no indication of how much is to be drunk, and none of the safeguards a modern brewer would expect: no measured gravity, no acid or sulphite control, no sanitation beyond "cover up close" through fifteen months of storage. If a herbal aperitif is wanted, use a current recipe with weighed botanicals.
- Archaic terms, for reading onlySoft water is rainwater or other low-mineral water; loaf sugar is refined cane sugar broken from a cone, equivalent to plain white sugar; "work it with yeast" means pitch yeast and let it ferment; isinglass is a fish-derived fining agent, now usually replaced by gelatin or bentonite.
- ScaleFour gallons of water with ten pounds of sugar is roughly the sugar loading of a strong country wine, and the pint of brandy at the end is both fortification and preservative. The finished quantity would have been some thirty pint bottles.
Bitters and bitter wines sat on the boundary between the kitchen and the medicine chest, and books like Cassell's carried them alongside cordials, ginger beer and elderberry wine because the household still expected to make its own tonics. Wormwood is the defining ingredient: its Latin name Artemisia absinthium gives absinthe its name, and the German Wermut gives vermouth its own, both trading on the herb's reputation as a stomachic and appetite-rouser. Chamomile, gentian and rosemary belong to the same tradition of bitter digestive plants, generally traced back through early modern herbals to classical writers on wine steeped with herbs. What the recipe shows most clearly is how loosely the Victorian home worked with active plant material — quarts and handfuls where a dispensing chemist of the same decade would have weighed to the grain.