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Wine, Marigold
Take twenty-five pounds of good loaf sugar and four pounds of honey, and boil them, with ten gallons of soft water and the whites of eight eggs well beaten, one hour, skimming it until quite clear, and pour it hot upon three pecks of marigold flowers and four pounds of good raisins stoned and shredded, covering the vessel closely. Next day stir the liquor continually for twenty minutes, and let it remain covered until the following morning. Then strain the liquor, and put it into your cask upon the rinds of six Seville oranges pared very thin, and eight ounces of sugar-candy broken small, reserving two gallons, which must be made nearly boiling hot, then stirred into the rest. Next work it with nearly seven or eight table-spoonfuls of good fresh yeast, cover the bunghole with a tile, and let the wine work over, filling it up every day as the liquor decreases. When the fermentation has ceased, pour in three pints of French brandy and an ounce of dissolved isinglass, and stop it up securely. It will be fine in nine months, and fit for bottling, but will improve if kept longer. Let it remain for twelve months in bottles well corked and sealed.
A full-scale Victorian country wine: ten gallons of flower must, fortified and aged for the better part of two years. Almost nothing here needs correcting so much as translating and scaling.
- Which marigoldThis means pot marigold, Calendula officinalis, the old English garden flower, not the modern bedding Tagetes sold as French or African marigold. Use the petals only; the green base of the flower head is bitter and resinous.
- Three pecks of flowersA peck is 8 dry quarts, so three pecks is roughly 6 gallons of loose petals by volume — an enormous quantity that assumes a kitchen garden border, not a florist. Scaled to a 1-gallon batch you are looking at somewhere near 2 to 3 quarts of loose petals.
- Scaling the batchDivide everything by ten for a manageable gallon: 2.5 lb sugar, about 6.5 oz honey, 6.5 oz raisins, the rind of half a Seville orange, 0.8 oz sugar candy, about 6 fl oz brandy (imperial measure). The single egg white's worth of clarifying is easier done by simply skimming.
- Loaf sugar and sugar-candyLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated is the direct equivalent. Sugar-candy is large crystallised sugar rock, used here for slow secondary feeding — rock sugar or plain granulated will behave the same.
- Soft waterThe instruction is not decorative. Hard water throws off the acid balance and can leave a chalky finish in a delicate flower wine. Filtered or bottled low-mineral water is the modern answer; if using tap water, let chlorine off overnight.
- The yeastSeven or eight tablespoons of good fresh yeast for ten gallons reflects a period when household bakers' yeast or brewer's barm was what came to hand. A single sachet of wine yeast per gallon does the job better, ferments cleaner, and tolerates the alcohol this must will reach.
- The tile over the bungholeThis is the old method of letting the cask blow off froth freely while keeping dust out, topping up daily to keep the vessel full. An airlock achieves the same protection from oxygen and vinegar bacteria with far less attention.
- Isinglass and brandyAn ounce of isinglass to ten gallons is a fining agent, dissolved in a little wine before stirring in; modern finings are dosed similarly. Three pints of brandy in ten gallons is under 4 per cent of the volume and adds only around 1.5 per cent alcohol by volume — enough to steady the wine, not enough to make it a fortified wine in the sherry sense.
- TimingNine months to fine and twelve more in bottle is not exaggeration for a heavy sugar wine of this kind. It will taste raw and hot at six months and be unrecognisably better at two years.
Flower wines belong to the long English tradition of the still-room, where cowslip, dandelion, elderflower and marigold were all turned into sweet fermented cordials by households that had more garden than money. Calendula was a standard kitchen-garden plant for centuries, valued as a colouring and flavouring for broths and puddings and often called poor man's saffron for the yellow it gave; using it for wine is an extension of the same thrift. Cassell's, compiling in the late nineteenth century, was gathering up recipes already old — the scale here, ten gallons in a cask with a tile over the bunghole, describes a country house or substantial farmhouse rather than a town kitchen, and cheaper imported grape wine was one of the pressures that would make such labour look quaint. The pattern is standard for the genre: boil sugar and water into a syrup, clarify with egg white, infuse the flowers, ferment on raisins for body and tannin, fine with isinglass, and give it a long sleep.