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WINE, DAMSON (another way)
Gather the damsons when dry, stone them, and mash them with your hand. Put them into a vessel with a fauset, and to eight pounds of fruit add one gallon of water. Boil the water, and put it to the fruit scalding hot. Let it stand about two days, then draw it off; and to every gallon of liquor put three pounds of fine sugar. Let the barrel be full and stop it closely. If it is a large quantity, let the wine stand twelve months before you drink it.
A country fruit wine of the simplest kind: fruit, hot water, sugar, time. The instructions assume a wooden cask and a cellar, and they leave out everything a modern winemaker takes for granted, so read them as a sketch rather than a procedure.
- The hinge: seal loosely, not closely"Stop it closely" was written for a wooden barrel, which breathes through its staves and around the bung. Doing the same with a glass demijohn or a screw-top jar traps carbon dioxide from an active ferment and the vessel can burst. Fermentation needs an airlock or a loosely covered vessel until it has finished entirely.
- FausetA faucet in the older sense: a tap or spigot fitted low in the side of a tub or cask, so the clear liquor can be drawn off from beneath the floating pulp. A straining bag and a siphon do the same job.
- QuantitiesEight pounds of damsons to one gallon of water, then three pounds of sugar to each gallon of the strained liquor. The gallon is the imperial one, about 4.5 litres, so the sugar ratio is roughly 300 g per litre. That is a heavy must, in the range that gives a sweet wine of around 14 per cent or a stuck ferment if the yeast gives out first.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeasts on the fruit skins and in the vessel; what the two-day standing period was for is not stated. Scalding water poured over the fruit kills a good part of that population, so the ferment may be slow, erratic, or dominated by spoilage organisms. Modern practice is a measured wine yeast and a Campden tablet the day before pitching.
- Stoning the damsonsThe instruction is explicit. Damson kernels, like those of other stone fruit, contain amygdalin, though unbroken stones release little of it; the practical objection to leaving them in is the bitter, almond note that long steeping can draw out. Halving and pitting eight pounds of small plums is the real labour of this recipe.
- "Let the barrel be full"Headspace over a finished wine invites acetic bacteria and turns it to vinegar. The original solves this by topping the cask up to the bung. Keep vessels filled to the neck after fermentation stops, and rack off the lees rather than leaving the wine sitting on them for a year.
- YieldNot stated. Eight pounds of fruit and a gallon of water, once the pulp is drawn off and sugar added, gives somewhere near a gallon of finished wine, about six 75 cl bottles.
- Twelve monthsThe recipe attaches this to a large quantity. Damson wine is harsh and tannic when young, so the long rest reads as genuine advice rather than caution.
Damsons, the small oval plums generally traced to Damascus by way of their name, were a hedgerow and orchard fruit across the English counties, much of the crop destined for cheese, jam, gin and wine. Household wine-making of this sort belonged to a domestic economy in which a glut of fruit that would not keep had to be turned into something that would, and Cassell's, which ran to several variants of most things, gives this as "another way" among a run of country wines built on the same template of fruit, boiling water, sugar and a cask. The reliance on wild fermentation and on the cook's judgement rather than a hydrometer is characteristic of the period, and a recipe like this one succeeded or soured largely by luck and by the cleanliness of the barrel.