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WINE, CHERRY (another way)
Pick Morella cherries, not over-ripe, from their stalks, mash them in a mortar, and press to detach the pulp without bruising the stones, and let the mass stand twenty-four hours. Press the pulp through a coarse hair sieve, and to every three gallons add from eight to nine pounds of loaf sugar. Put the mixture into a cask, add yeast, and allow it to ferment, then rack the wine from its lees as soon as it grows clear. Some makers of cherry wine crack the stones and put them with the bruised kernels in a bag suspended from the bung-hole, so as to be covered by the liquid during the fermentation of the wine, which thus acquires a nutty flavour. A good deal of this wine is made in Russia, where it is a common practice to add honey to the cherries.
Fruit wine is still made at home, but this particular set of instructions carries one hazard that cannot be worked around and several gaps that a modern winemaker would have to fill from another source.
- The cracked stones are the problemCherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the crushed kernel meets water and the fruit's own enzymes. Suspending a bag of bruised kernels in the must for the whole of a fermentation, as the recipe describes, is a deliberate long extraction into a liquid that is then drunk undiluted. The "nutty flavour" and the toxin come from the same compound.
- Whole stones are a different matter from cracked onesThe first part of the method presses the pulp "without bruising the stones", and intact stones pass through the process essentially inert. The recipe gives no reason for the instruction, but the later suggestion deliberately crushes what the earlier step kept whole, which is why it should not be followed as printed.
- No acid, tannin or sulphiteThere is no campden, no measured acid, no pH check and no specified yeast strain, so nothing here controls spoilage organisms or oxidation over the course of the ferment.
- "Add yeast" is not a quantityThe recipe names neither a yeast nor a source, and gives no pitching rate, no temperature and no endpoint beyond racking "as soon as it grows clear", so the ferment cannot be reproduced or judged.
- The sugar figure is enormous and unverifiableThe sugar figure cannot be checked -- eight to nine pounds of loaf sugar to three gallons, about three pounds a gallon, is a conventional country-wine rate, but the resulting starting gravity depends on the ripeness of the fruit, which the recipe cannot know. Without a hydrometer reading there is no way to tell whether the result will finish dry, stick sweet, or restart in the bottle.
- If you want cherry wineUse a current country-wine recipe with measured sugar, acid and sulphite additions and a named yeast. Nothing in this entry should be adapted into one.
"Morella" is a variant English spelling of morello, the dark sour cherry (Prunus cerasus) long grown in English fruit gardens and too sharp for the table but ideal for preserving, brandy-steeping and wine. Cassell's places this among a long run of home-made wines that were the ordinary product of a country household, racked off the lees in the usual way. The Russian practice the entry mentions is real enough: sweetened sour-cherry drinks, honeyed and often kernel-flavoured, are a long-standing tradition there, and vishnyovka remains a familiar name for cherry liquor. The taste for a "nutty" note from cracked stones was widespread across European fruit cookery of the period, appearing in ratafias, noyau and almond-scented custards alike, all of them drawing on the same benzaldehyde note that accompanies the amygdalin.