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Ginger Vinegar
For each quart of strong vinegar allow two ounces of crushed white ginger and let stand two months, when strain, bottle, and cork well.
GINGER WINE No. I (Old Recipe) Allow twelve ounces of bruised ginger to nine gallons of soft water and boil till well-flavoured, when add eighteen pounds of sugar. Let dissolve and partially cool when add a little hop-yeast. When clear rack off and bottle at once.
GINGER WINE No. 2 (Old Recipe) To ten gallons of soft water add fifteen pounds of "loafsugar clarified with the whites of six eggs," and one-half pound of sliced and bruised white ginger. When this has boiled one-half hour stir into it the thin-peeled yellow rind of a dozen lemons and let stand till cool. Then add a gill of yeast, first, however, reserving two quarts of the mixture in which must be dissolved two ounces of isinglass. When dissolved mix with the other liquor; stir well and let stand twelve hours, when the bung should be closed. Bottle in three weeks and in four months it will be ready to use.
Three separate preparations run together here: a steeped flavouring vinegar and two cask-scale ginger wines. The vinegar is straightforward; the wines are nineteenth-century brewing written for a cellar, and the quantities and vessels are the main obstacles.
- White gingerNot a variety but a grade — dried ginger rhizome that has been scraped or lime-bleached, sold whole and rock-hard. Whole dried ginger from a spice merchant is the right substitute; fresh root gives a brighter, thinner flavour and will not keep in vinegar the same way. Crush or bruise it with a mallet rather than grinding, or the vinegar clouds and the wine is a nuisance to rack.
- Strong vinegarMeans full-strength cider or malt vinegar, roughly 5 percent acidity, not diluted. Two ounces of ginger to a quart is a firm infusion; two months in a cool dark place is not excessive for dried root, though it will taste of ginger within two weeks if you want to strain early.
- A gillA quarter-pint: four fluid ounces in American measure, five in imperial. That is a great deal of yeast by modern reckoning because it means a slurry of live barm skimmed from a beer, not dried yeast. Dried wine yeast is the modern substitute, pitched by the packet instructions for the volume of must.
- Hop-yeast and soft waterHop-yeast is brewer's barm from a hopped beer, carrying its own bitterness. Soft water means low in mineral salts — rainwater or, today, filtered or distilled water; hard tap water dulls the ginger and can leave a chalky edge.
- Loaf sugar clarified with egg whitesLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone, and clarifying it with beaten whites lifted the scum from less pure batches. Modern granulated sugar needs none of this; use plain white sugar and skip the eggs entirely.
- IsinglassA fining agent from fish swim bladders, dissolved to drop suspended yeast and leave the wine bright. Two ounces is generous for ten gallons. Modern equivalents are liquid isinglass, gelatine, or a vegetarian fining such as bentonite, all dosed by the packet instructions — or simply give the wine longer and rack it off the sediment twice.
- Scale and vesselsNine and ten gallons assume a cask that can be bunged. Divide the recipes by eight for a demijohn-sized 5 litre batch (No. 2 becomes about 850 g sugar, 30 g ginger and one and a half lemons in all) and use an airlock in place of the bung.
- Bottling too soonThis is the hinge. "Bottle in three weeks" and "rack off and bottle at once" both risk corking a wine that is still fermenting; sealed bottles under pressure can burst. Ferment out until the specific gravity holds steady for several days, then bottle.
- Yield and useThe ginger vinegar makes one quart of a sharp, warming vinegar useful in dressings, with cold pork, or in chutney. The scaled-down wine gives about six 750 ml bottles, sweet and strong, traditionally drunk in small glasses in cold weather.
Ginger wine belongs to a British tradition of household "made wines" — country wines fermented from sugar and water with a flavouring rather than from grapes — and it was the winter drink of the group, served warm or with a lump of sugar against a chill. Its ingredient came a long way: the dried, scraped rhizome sold as white ginger drew on several sources in the nineteenth century, with the Jamaican grade the prized one, cheap enough by then to buy by the pound in a domestic kitchen, and ginger's reputation as a stomach-settling warmer is much older than the wine. Commercial versions, of which the green-bottled ginger wines still sold in Britain are the survivors, are generally traced to eighteenth-century London makers, and recipes like these two — both labelled "Old Recipe" even in their own book — are the home cook's parallel. Their inclusion in a fruit book alongside the ginger vinegar reflects a period habit of grouping preparations by their flavouring rather than by whether the result was a condiment or a drink.