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Wine, Gilliflower
To three gallons of water put six pounds of the best powdered white sugar; boil the sugar and water together for half an hour, keep skimming as the scum rises; let it stand to cool. Beat up three ounces of syrup of betony with a large spoonful of ale yeast, put this into the liquor, and brew it well together; then, having a peck of gilliflowers cut from the stalks, put them into the liquor, let them infuse and work together three days covered with a cloth; strain the wine, put it into a cask, and let it settle for three or four weeks; then bottle it.
A flower wine of the old country-house type: sugar syrup, a scoop of ale yeast and an enormous quantity of clove-pink petals. It can be made today, but two things in it — the betony syrup and the bottling schedule — need attention before you start.
- What gilliflowers areThe clove gilliflower is Dianthus caryophyllus, the clove pink or old-fashioned border carnation, prized for a scent close to cloves. Use only unsprayed garden or edible-grade flowers; modern florist carnations are treated with chemicals not intended for consumption.
- Strip the heelsThe white base where each petal joins the calyx is bitter, and in the quantities used here it will dominate the finished wine. "Cut from the stalks" understates the job: pull the petals and trim off the pale heels.
- A peck of petalsA peck is 8 dry quarts, about 9 litres of loose petals — a very large basketful. Some modern flower-wine recipes call for less; scale down if your garden cannot supply it, accepting a lighter result.
- Syrup of betonyAn old apothecary preparation of wood betony (Stachys officinalis) in sugar syrup, used as a mild tonic and flavouring. It is no longer sold and contributes little the flowers do not; it can be omitted, or replaced with a small quantity of a plain herbal syrup.
- YeastAle yeast will ferment this but leaves a bready character and tends to stop early. A neutral wine yeast started in a little of the cooled syrup gives a cleaner ferment and finishes drier.
- Sugar and strengthSix pounds of sugar in three gallons is about 2 lb to the gallon, enough sugar for a wine of ordinary strength, though an ale yeast may well stall before it is all fermented and leave the wine sweet. The original includes no acid source such as lemon juice, which modern flower-wine practice usually adds.
- The hinge: do not bottle earlyThree or four weeks' settling is no guarantee that fermentation has finished, and bottling a working wine bursts bottles. Wait for the airlock to be still and the specific gravity to read the same for several days running before bottling.
- YieldAbout three gallons, some 13.6 litres, or roughly eighteen 75 cl bottles, before losses to the lees and to the half-hour's boiling.
Flower wines were part of the English still-room repertoire, alongside cowslip, elderflower and dandelion, and the clove gilliflower was valued for its spicy scent — the same quality that recommended it for flavouring vinegars and conserves. The syrup of betony suggests a formula with roots in an older manuscript tradition, where the line between a cordial and a medicine was thin: betony was widely prescribed in the medieval and early modern pharmacopoeia, and was credited with virtues ranging from headache relief to protection against ill fortune. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared, such a recipe is likely to have read as antiquarian, though how many households still brewed it is not recorded.