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WINE, CHERRY (a French recipe)
Bruise together fifteen pounds of cherries not quite ripe, and two of currants; add two-thirds of the cherry kernels. Put the whole in a small cask with a quarter of a pound of sugar to each quart of juice. Let the cask stand in sand, and cover the bung tightly while the wine is working, which will occupy nearly three weeks. The cask should be of the size just to hold the juice, or the latter must be made up in the above proportions to the size of the cask, as it is necessary it should be full. Carry on the fermentation in the usual manner, as in grape or gooseberry wine. When the fermentation is over, bung up the cask, and in about two months the wine will be fit to be drawn off and bottled.
This is a country fruit wine of a type once made all over Europe, but the instruction that gives it its flavour is also the one that makes it unsafe, and the vessel handling described would not pass in any modern cellar.
- The kernels are the problemCherry stones contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside; crushing them in the presence of moisture releases hydrogen cyanide. Adding the bruised kernels of two-thirds of fifteen pounds of cherries puts an unmeasured and potentially large dose into a liquid that is then drunk undiluted.
- Fermentation does not remove itFermentation cannot be relied on to remove it -- yeast does not detoxify cyanide, though some hydrogen cyanide is volatile and may be carried off with the escaping carbon dioxide. Heat destroys the enzyme that liberates it, and there is no heating step here. The bitter-almond note the recipe is chasing comes from the same compound that carries the risk.
- A tightly covered bung during the fermentThe recipe says to cover the bung tightly while the wine is working. Active fermentation in a completely full, sealed cask generates carbon dioxide with nowhere to go; casks under that pressure can spring a stave or blow the bung out with force. Modern practice uses an airlock and headspace for exactly this reason.
- No acidity, sugar or hygiene figuresA quarter pound of sugar per quart of juice is the only process measurement given beyond the weights of fruit. There is no gravity, no acid or pH target, no sulphite, and no sanitation step, so there is no way to judge either the finished strength or whether spoilage organisms have taken hold.
- If you want cherry wineUse a current fruit-wine recipe with measured sugar, acid and sulphite additions, stones removed rather than crushed, and a fermenter fitted with an airlock.
- Reading the originalFor context only: a cask "of the size just to hold the juice" means a vessel filled to the brim to exclude air, the period's substitute for an airlock; standing it in sand may have steadied the temperature, though the recipe does not say why. Fifteen pounds of cherries with two of currants is a small domestic batch, probably nearer a gallon or so of juice.
Cherry wine belongs to the long tradition of English and French household fruit wines — gooseberry, currant, elderberry, cowslip — made where grapes would not ripen and recorded in many nineteenth-century domestic manuals, Cassell's included, alongside the vinegars, cordials and home-brewed beers of the same chapter. The use of the crushed stones is deliberate and old: the kernel supplies the bitter-almond flavour prized in French *noyau* and in kirsch, which is traditionally distilled from whole cherries, stones and all. The under-ripe cherries and the added currants are there for acid and tannin, which the period understood empirically as the things that made a fruit wine keep rather than turn; the kernels it valued for flavour were also a source of cyanide, a connection already established by the time Cassell's was compiled.