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Wine, Cherry, Red
Take some ripe red cherries, press them, breaking the stones amongst the fruit, till you have obtained ten gallons of pure juice. Add twenty-four pounds of strong, bright moist sugar, stir well, and let the liquor stand three days covered up, stirring twice every day. Press the fruit in a horse-hair bag, and add the result to the juice; then mix well, and strain into a sweet cask, adding five pints of French brandy, the rinds of six lemons pared very thin, and an ounce of the best isinglass dissolved in a little water. Secure the bung tightly, and let the wine stand for six months in a cool cellar; then rack it off, filter the lees perfectly fine, and put all into the same cask again with three ounces of sugar-candy broken into large pieces. Fasten the bung as before, keep the wine eighteen months, and then bottle it. This excellent wine deserves keeping till it is very old. A rich white cherry wine may be made as follows. Take all kinds of ripe cherries, and bruise them in a tub till you have extracted eight gallons of juice; add sixteen pounds of good moist sugar, and set the liquor aside (covered closely up) for three days. Put two gallons of soft water upon the fruit, stir well for twenty minutes, and infuse for the same length of time. Then pare the rinds off four Seville oranges and three lemons-pare them very thin-stone and shred four pounds of Smyrna raisins, put them into a sweet ten-gallon cask with the juice of the oranges and lemons strained, and six ounces of sugar-candy. Mix the liquors from the two vessels and strain well; then filter through a flannel bag, and fill the cask; leave the bung out four or five days; add a pint and a half of brandy and an ounce of isinglass dissolved in a little light wine, and stop up the cask safely for eighteen months. Then bottle the wine, seal the corks, and in six or eight months it will be fit for use. This wine will remain good for three years, not longer.
This is a country-wine recipe of the barrel-and-cellar era, and the first version turns on a step no modern winemaker would repeat: deliberately breaking the cherry stones into the juice. Read it as a document rather than a set of instructions.
- Crushed cherry stonesCherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is broken and wetted by an acidic, enzyme-active juice. "Breaking the stones amongst the fruit" for ten gallons of must means a very large number of crushed kernels held in contact with the liquid for months, and the resulting cyanide load cannot be measured or controlled in a home cellar. This is the same class of hazard as bitter almonds. Commercially, kernel-derived flavour (as in kirsch and noyau) is produced under controlled conditions with legal limits on residual hydrogen cyanide, which a domestic cask ferment cannot replicate.
- A sealed bung on a fermenting mustSugar is added, the vessel is stirred for three days, and then the bung is "secured tightly" for six months. Fermentation is still generating carbon dioxide at that point; a sealed rigid vessel under that pressure is a bursting risk, which is why airlocks exist. The second version's instruction to leave the bung out four or five days shows the writer knew this, and the first version ignores it.
- No yeast, no acid or sugar measurementThe wine relies entirely on wild yeast and bacteria from the fruit skins and the cask, with no sulphite, no starting gravity, no pH and no way of knowing whether fermentation ever finished. Twenty-four pounds of sugar in ten gallons may stall part-way and leave a sweet, unstable liquid.
- VolumesThese are imperial gallons, so ten gallons is roughly twelve US gallons, about forty-five litres of juice — on a rough juice yield, something well over a hundredweight of cherries pressed by hand, and the recipe then presses the fruit again in a horse-hair bag and adds that too. Nothing about the scale suits a domestic kitchen even setting the safety questions aside.
- If you want cherry wineUse a current winemaking recipe with pitched yeast, measured sulphite, a hydrometer and an airlock, working from destoned fruit.
- Reading the ingredient list"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar; "sugar-candy" is large crystallised sugar lumps, added here at racking and probably intended to feed a slow secondary ferment. Isinglass is a collagen fining agent made from fish swim bladders, sturgeon in the classic form. A "sweet cask" means a clean one, free of any sourness or taint.
Cassell's devotes many pages to home-made wines because a middle-class British household with a garden or an orchard glut had every reason to ferment it: sugar was cheap and a cool cellar was standard equipment. Cherry wine of this kind sits between two traditions — the English country wine, sweet, brandy-fortified and expected to keep for years, and the continental habit of using cracked cherry stones for their almond-like ratafia flavour, which survives in kirsch and in noyau liqueurs. The materials are the ordinary grocer's stock of the period: Smyrna raisins from the Aegean, Seville oranges, French brandy by the pint, and isinglass for fining. The blunt closing note that the white version "will remain good for three years, not longer" is characteristic of the book's practical voice, and a reminder that these wines were provisions to be used up rather than bottles to be collected.