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Black Currant and Strawberry Wine
To three gallons black currants add six quarts strawberries, two ounces red tartar, and twelve and a half pounds of sugar. Heat the fruit and press out juice then add sugar. When dissolved stir in five and a half gallons soft water and let ferment.
A country fruit wine written for someone who already knew the routine: the original assumes wild yeast, an open crock, and a cook who could judge fermentation by smell and sound. The quantities are enormous, and the gaps are as important as what is written down.
- Scale firstAs written this makes something in the region of eight to ten gallons of finished wine and needs a vessel with generous headroom above that. Dividing by five or ten gives a manageable one- or two-gallon batch, and all the proportions scale cleanly.
- Red tartarThis is argol, the crude reddish potassium bitartrate scraped from wine casks; cream of tartar is the refined form of the same salt. Two ounces across ten gallons is an acid and tartrate adjustment, nothing more.
- Soft waterRainwater or any low-mineral water. Hard tap water dulls the fruit; filtered or distilled water is the modern equivalent, and chlorinated water should be left to stand or be treated before use.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on yeast living on the fruit skins, which is why results in these books varied so widely. A packet of cultured wine yeast, pitched once the must has cooled to room temperature, is what makes the difference between wine and vinegar.
- Sugar and strengthTwelve and a half pounds of sugar in eight to ten gallons of liquid, plus the fruit's own sugar, points to a modest wine of roughly seven to nine per cent alcohol. A hydrometer reading before fermentation tells you exactly where you stand; the original cook most likely worked without one.
- Heating the fruitWarming black currants to loosen the juice sets pectin and gives a permanent haze. Keep the fruit below a simmer, or add pectic enzyme after cooling, and expect the wine to need months of settling either way.
- "Let ferment" is not a timeVigorous primary fermentation runs five to ten days at room temperature. After that the wine should be moved off its sediment into a closed vessel with an airlock; left open in a crock for weeks it will take up acetic bacteria and turn.
- SanitationEverything the must touches after heating needs to be sanitised, not merely washed. This is the single step that period recipes never mention and that determines whether the batch is drinkable.
Black currants and strawberries ripen within a few weeks of each other in northern gardens, and this is a classic use for a glut of both: the currant supplies acid, tannin and colour, the strawberry supplies perfume it lacks. Fruit "wines" of this kind were ordinary household production in Britain and North America through the nineteenth century, made in stone crocks and bottled for winter, and they sat in cookbooks beside jams and cordials as simply another way of keeping fruit. The presence of red tartar, or argol, is a small trace of commercial winemaking reaching the domestic kitchen. Black currants themselves later became scarce in parts of the United States, where cultivation was restricted in the early twentieth century because the plants host white pine blister rust, which is one reason recipes like this one read as unfamiliar to American cooks today.