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WINE, PEACH (a Canadian recipe)
Take the stones out of forty-five pounds of ripe peaches, slice the fruit into a clean vessel, and strew over and amongst them ten pounds of loaf sugar broken small; let them lie covered up until the next day. Boil for half an hour ten gallons of soft-water, with sixteen pounds of loaf sugar and the whites of ten eggs beaten fine, skimming it until clear; then put to it the fruit and sugar out of the vessel, and boil them to a pulp, taking off the scum as it rises. Put the whole into a tub upon the shells and kernels of the peaches previously broken, stir it well, and when properly cooled stir well amongst it nearly half a pint of good yeast, and leave it to ferment. Stir it well two days at proper intervals, then strain the liquor through a fine sieve, and put it in your cask to work over, keeping the vessel always full. Add the thin rinds of six Seville oranges, and half a pint of orange and lemon juice mixed, and when the fermentation has ceased, put in two quarts of brandy, and stop it up for two months. Then rack it off, into a clean vessel, filter the lees, and fill the cask again, adding an ounce of dissolved isinglass and six ounces of sugar-candy. Stop it up securely, and keep it twelve months; then bottle it, seal the corks, and let it be six months longer before you drink it. It is a delicious wine, and may be made at a trifling expense.
This is a large-batch country wine of a type common in nineteenth-century household books, and the one step that defines its flavour is also the one that rules it out. The notes below explain the hazard and decode the archaic terms, but the recipe should not be followed.
- The kernels are the problemThe must is fermented on "the shells and kernels of the peaches previously broken" — that is, the crushed almond-like seeds inside the stones. Peach kernels contain amygdalin, which enzymes in crushed plant tissue and water convert to hydrogen cyanide. The kernels from forty-five pounds of fruit represent a large and entirely unmeasured dose steeping in liquid for days.
- Why fermentation does not fix itCyanide released from amygdalin stays largely in the liquid; yeast does not destroy it, and this wine is never boiled after the kernels go in. Racking, fining with isinglass and the recipe's own long maturation — two months stopped up, twelve in cask, six in bottle — clarify the wine but cannot be relied on to detoxify it. If you want peach wine, use a current recipe that ferments the flesh only.
- No measured acidity or sanitationA ten-gallon open-tub ferment with half a pint of unspecified "good yeast" and no acid, sulphite or gravity readings is a wild-culture process. A modern reader has no way to judge from the text whether a batch has gone right or gone bad.
- ScaleTen gallons of water plus twenty-six pounds of sugar and forty-five pounds of fruit, boiled down and strained, still makes many dozens of bottles. This is a cellar project, not a kitchen one.
- Loaf sugar and sugar-candyLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed; it is plain granulated sugar. Sugar-candy is large crystallised sugar, added here late as a sweetener and to feed a slow secondary ferment.
- Isinglass and Seville orangesIsinglass is a collagen fining agent from fish swim bladders, still sold to brewers. Seville oranges are the bitter marmalade orange, in season only in midwinter; their thin rind supplies bitterness and aroma rather than juice.
- UnitsThe half pint of yeast and the half pint of mixed citrus juice are imperial half-pints, about ten fluid ounces or 285 ml each — rather more than a US cup. Ten imperial gallons is about twelve US gallons, or forty-five litres.
Victorian household dictionaries carried a long run of "made wines" — cowslip, gooseberry, elderberry, rhubarb, peach — for households with orchard gluts and no way to keep fruit. Peaches from the Niagara peninsula and southern Ontario were abundant and cheap by the later nineteenth century, and the sugar and brandy that fortify this wine were the expensive part. Fermenting on the crushed stones was deliberate: the kernels give the noyau or bitter-almond note that period palates prized in ratafias, macaroons and fruit cordials, and the same chemistry that produces that flavour produces the cyanide. Books of this era print kernel-flavoured drinks freely; the practice has since fallen out of domestic use.