Plum Wine
To four gallons of damsons add five and a half gallons of soft water. Simmer till tender, when strain; add fifteen pounds of sugar and six ounces red tartar. Strain and let ferment as with other wines. Or a syrup may be made of the sugar and water and cooked with the plums two IOO hours. One-fourth pint of yeast may be added to this and let ferment ten days covered. With either formula the bruised kernels of half the plums should be added to the mixture and let stand till after fermentation.
This is a country fruit wine of the English type, printed in a period when home winemaking notes were passed along in a few lines and much was assumed. Two things put it out of range: the deliberate addition of crushed plum stones, and the absence of any usable fermentation control.
- The kernels are the reason to stopThe instruction to add "the bruised kernels of half the plums" is the fatal detail. Plum stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and left in a wet, enzyme-active medium — exactly the conditions described. The kernels from half of four gallons of damsons is a very large quantity of amygdalin steeping in liquid for weeks, and fermentation cannot be relied on to remove it.
- Why old books did it anywayCrushed kernels were added for the bitter-almond aroma, the same flavour sought in noyau and ratafia. Nineteenth-century cookery writers treated the practice as ordinary, even though the hazard of prussic acid from bitter almonds and stone-fruit kernels was already known to chemists during the same century; modern flavourings supply the same note without the glycoside. If you want plum wine, use a current recipe from a winemaking source.
- "Two IOO hours" is a printing errorThe phrase is garbled type; "IOO" reads as a stray "100", plausibly a page number dropped into the line. The author's intended time cannot be recovered from the text, so the second method cannot be followed as printed.
- Red tartarThis is argol, the crude reddish potassium bitartrate scraped from wine casks, the unrefined ancestor of cream of tartar. The recipe adds six ounces to roughly ten gallons of liquid; it is not sold in this form for domestic use now.
- Soft waterSoft water meant rainwater or water low in dissolved calcium, as distinct from hard well water. Nothing in the phrase implies any treatment beyond that.
- No fermentation control at allThere is no temperature, no specific gravity, no acid measurement, no mention of sanitising vessels, and "one-fourth pint of yeast" means a barm of unknown strain and unknown vigour. "Let ferment as with other wines" assumes a reader who already ran a cellar and could judge by taste, smell and the behaviour of the surface.
- ScaleFour gallons of damsons with five and a half gallons of water and fifteen pounds of sugar makes a cask-sized quantity rather than a domestic batch; the finished yield after simmering, straining and racking is not stated in the recipe.
Damsons are the small, dark, sharply acid plums of the Prunus domestica group, long grown in English hedgerows and orchard corners because they crop heavily, need little attention, and are too astringent to eat out of hand. That astringency made them a preserving fruit above all: damson cheese, damson jam, damson gin, and wine like this one. Recipes of this shape run through British and American household books from the eighteenth century onward, and their vagueness is not carelessness but shorthand �conce and a reader already equipped for home brewing and preserving needed only the proportions. The addition of crushed kernels belongs to the same period taste that produced ratafia, noyau and almond-flavoured custards, where the bitter-almond note was drawn straight from stone fruit pits.