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Wine, Coltsfoot
Take ten gallons of soft-or river-water, and boil with it for three-quarters of an hour twenty-six pounds of moist sugar and the whites of ten eggs well beaten, skimming well all the time. Pour the liquor boiling hot on three pecks of fresh-gathered colts-foot flowers and ten pounds of Malaga raisins stoned and cut small; cover the vessel up close, and let them infuse three days, stirring three times daily. Then make two gallons of the liquor scalding hot, stir it well into the rest, and add six or seven table-spoonfuls of good yeast; keep it well mixed and covered up, until it has worked freely, then strain it into your cask upon three ounces of the best ginger bruised and the thin rinds of six Seville oranges, and let it remain open, covering the bunghole with a tile until the wine has ceased fermenting. Add three half-pints of French brandy and a bottle of strong Madeira, stop the cask up securely, and keep the wine twelve months; then bottle it, and drink in six months more. This is a valuable wine for its medicinal properties.
This is a large-batch country wine built on a flower that is no longer considered safe to consume. The notes below explain the scale and the vocabulary, and then why the batch should not be made.
- Why not: coltsfoot alkaloidsTussilago farfara contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which are hepatotoxic and associated with hepatic veno-occlusive disease. The flowers are not exempt; alkaloid content varies with the plant and season, so no home batch can be assumed low.
- Boiling and fermentation do not helpPyrrolizidine alkaloids are not destroyed by pouring boiling liquor over the flowers, by three days of infusion, or by fermentation. They carry through into the finished wine and into the bottle.
- The dose here is not smallThree pecks of flowers -- roughly 24 dry quarts, about six dry gallons of loose blossom -- steeped into ten gallons of liquid, then drunk over months, is the pattern of repeated low-level exposure associated with cumulative liver injury. The damage is not from one glass.
- The medicinal claim is the problem, not a mitigationThe closing line, "valuable for its medicinal properties," reflects coltsfoot's long use as a cough remedy. That reputation is precisely why several countries now restrict or prohibit coltsfoot in food and herbal products.
- Reading the unitsA peck is a quarter-bushel, about 8 dry quarts. "Moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined cane sugar, damp and brownish. Malaga raisins are large sweet muscatels, used here for body and extra fermentables.
- The Madeira and brandyThe spirit and fortified wine go in after fermentation has stopped, just before the cask is stopped up securely for its year of keeping. Fortifying a country wine in this way was commonly understood as a preservative as much as a flavouring, in an era without campden tablets or reliable airlocks.
- If you want a spring flower wineUse a current recipe built on an ingredient in ordinary food use, with modern sanitation and an airlock. Do not adapt this one by substituting the flower.
Coltsfoot takes its botanical name, Tussilago, from the Latin tussis, a cough -- the plant was a standard pectoral remedy in European herbals for centuries, smoked, made into candy, boiled into syrup and, as here, fermented. Its bright yellow flowers appear on bare stems in very early spring, before the leaves, which made them one of the first gatherable crops of the year and a natural candidate for the household wine cupboard in a period when country wines were both a way of using a free harvest and a respectable vehicle for medicine. Recipes of this kind sit among long runs of flower and fruit wines in Victorian household books, all built on much the same template of sugar, water, raisins for body, yeast, and a cask left to work under a tile. The medicinal endorsement at the end is standard for the genre; the pyrrolizidine alkaloids that ended coltsfoot's culinary career were only identified and understood as a liver hazard in the twentieth century.