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Sherry of Raisins
To each quart of soft, boiled water, when cool, add a pound of raisins chopped, letting stand four weeks, stirring often. Strain liquor from the raisins and place it in a sealed jug. In a month rack it off, being careful not to disturb the sediment. To each five gallons allow the juice of six oranges and the rind (which should have stood twenty-four hours in a quart of brandy). Stir in also three pounds of loaf sugar for this quantity and mix all well, placing in a cask and bottling in four months.
This is a country wine, not a fortified sherry, and it is written at a scale most modern cooks will want to reduce. The proportions hold up; the equipment assumptions do not.
- Read the scale firstThe base is one pound of raisins per quart of water, but the orange, brandy and sugar additions are given per five gallons. Five gallons of base means twenty pounds of raisins, so scale the finishing ingredients down proportionally if you make a gallon or two.
- "Soft, boiled water"Soft water means low in dissolved calcium and magnesium; boiling drives off some temporary hardness and sterilises the water. Filtered or bottled low-mineral water, boiled and cooled to room temperature, does the same job.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar sold in cones and broken up as needed. Ordinary white granulated sugar is the direct equivalent, by weight.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast from the fruit and the air, which is why it wants four weeks of open standing and frequent stirring. Modern raisins are often treated with sulphur dioxide or a preservative oil coating, which suppresses that ferment; a packet of wine yeast is the reliable route, and unsulphured raisins are worth seeking out.
- Never seal a jug that is still working"Place it in a sealed jug" assumes the vigorous ferment has finished during the four weeks on the raisins. If it has not, a stoppered vessel can build enough pressure to burst. Use a fermentation lock, which does the same excluding of air without trapping gas.
- RackingRacking means siphoning the clear wine off the lees and leaving the sediment behind. A length of food-grade tubing and a second clean vessel; do it slowly and stop before the murk reaches the tube.
- The brandy-steeped rindTwenty-four hours of brandy on the peel extracts the aromatic oils without the bitterness that long boiling or pith would give. Pare the rind thinly, avoiding the white, and add both the brandy and the rind's infusion to the wine.
- SanitationEverything the liquid touches should be sanitised. A nineteenth-century cellar tolerated a good deal of stray bacteria; the usual result of ignoring this is a batch that turns to vinegar somewhere in the four-month wait.
- Yield and timingBottling at four months should give a young, still wine, likely on the sweet side. Bottle age may well improve it. The recipe's total timeline from raisin to glass -- four weeks on the fruit, a month before racking, four months to bottling -- is close to half a year.
Raisin wine was the standard household answer to a country without vineyards: dried grapes travelled and stored where fresh ones did not, and a pound of them carried enough sugar and character to ferment into something wine-like at any time of year. Calling the result "sherry" is aspirational rather than accurate. True sherry is a fortified wine from the Jerez region of Andalusia, aged under a film of flor yeast in a solera system, and nothing in this method reproduces that; the name here signals the intended flavour direction, a nutty, faintly oxidised sweet white, in the same loose way that period cookbooks offered "mock turtle" and "champagne" made of gooseberries. The orange rind steeped in brandy is the one touch that does real work, adding both aroma and a little spirit to help the wine keep. Recipes of this type appear throughout Anglo-American domestic manuals from the eighteenth century onward.