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WINE, ELDERBERRY (another way)
Take ten gallons of elderberries, ten gallons of water, forty-five pounds of white sugar, eight ounces of red tartar, and ferment with yeast in the usual way. When in the cask, four ounces of ginger-root sliced or allspice, and three ounces of bitter almonds, suspended in a bag, may be allowed to infuse in the liquor while it is fermenting; they are then to be removed. Brandy may be added or not. When the wine is clear, which will be in about three months, it may be drawn off from the lees and bottled. The spices may be varied according to taste.
This is a hundred-gallon-mentality country wine recipe, and two of its ingredients put it outside what can be made today. The problems are specific.
- Bitter almondsThree ounces of bitter almonds steeped in fermenting wine is the reason not to make this. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which enzymes in the crushed nut and in the must convert to hydrogen cyanide; the marzipan flavour the recipe is after is inseparable from the poison. Their sale for food use is restricted or prohibited in a number of countries for exactly this reason, and an infusion drawn off into bottles carries the compound with it.
- Scale of the extractionThe bag is suspended in a cask holding on the order of twenty gallons of liquor for the whole of the fermentation, and only then removed; the wine is not drawn off and bottled until about three months. That is a deliberate extraction rather than a brief flavouring, and there is no way to know from the text how much cyanogenic material ends up in a given bottle.
- Elder stems and leavesOnly the ripe berries were ever intended here. Elder stems, leaves and unripe fruit contain their own cyanogenic glycosides and are bitter and purgative; period sources often direct that the berries be stripped from the stalks, but this recipe does not say so.
- "Red tartar"Eight ounces of red tartar is argol, the crude reddish potassium bitartrate scraped from wine casks, the unrefined ancestor of cream of tartar. It was added to acidify a must made from a low-acid fruit. It is not the source of the problem, but it is no longer something a domestic cook can buy.
- "Ferment with yeast in the usual way"The recipe assumes the reader already knows what yeast to pitch and how to keep a cask topped up and guarded against vinegar bacteria. No quantity, temperature or gravity reading is given here.
- If you want elderberry wineUse a current winemaking recipe with measured acid, yeast and sanitation, and take the spicing from ginger or allspice alone. Do not adapt this one.
Elderberry wine was the great English hedgerow wine, made in quantity in farmhouses and parsonages because the fruit cost nothing and ripened in glut in September; it was drunk hot and spiced in winter and long credited with virtue against colds and chills. Cassell's gives more than one version, this one on a scale that assumes a cellar and a cask rather than a demijohn. The bitter almonds are a period signature: before synthetic flavourings, a noyau or ratafia note in wines, custards and cordials came from bitter almond, apricot kernel or peach kernel, and Victorian cookery books called for them freely. The risk was known in outline even then, cases of kernel poisoning being reported through the century, but the dose-consciousness that would eventually restrict their sale as food had not yet reached the domestic recipe book.