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Beverages: Boil
The blossoms should be picked carefully from the stems and the quart measure packed full. Put the sugar and water together over the fire, stir until the sugar is dissolved, then let it boil without stirring. Boil five minutes, skim, and add the blossoms. As soon as the blossoms are stirred in, take from the fire and cool. When lukewarm, add the dissolved yeast and lemon juice. Put in an earthen jar for six days, stirring thoroughly three times daily. The blossoms must be stirred from the bottom of the jar each time. On the seventh day strain through a cloth and add the raisins, seeded. Put in glass preserve jars and cover tightly.
Do not bottle until January.
Mint Fizzle.
This is a flower wine — almost certainly dandelion, judging by the packed quart of blossoms, the lemon, the yeast and the raisins — but the page as printed is a fragment. The ingredient list that preceded it has been lost, and the method itself ends in a fermentation practice that is no longer considered acceptable.
- No quantities surviveThe text opens mid-recipe with "the sugar and water," "the dissolved yeast," "the lemon juice" and "the raisins" — all quantities were given in a list that is not on this page. Wine-making depends on the sugar-to-water ratio, and there is no honest way to reconstruct it from what is here. Any figure would be invention.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenThe instruction is to strain the young wine, add seeded raisins, and put it in glass preserve jars "covered tightly" until January. The raisins bring further sugar with them, and any fermentation continuing in a tightly sealed rigid glass jar builds carbon dioxide pressure with no outlet. Preserve jars are not designed for it and can burst. A current wine-making reference, with an airlock and specified gravities, should be used instead.
- Blossoms onlyThe direction to pick blossoms carefully from the stems is the hinge of the flavour, not fussiness. Dandelion stems and green calyx bracts carry a bitter latex that turns the finished wine harsh, and the bitterness does not ferment out.
- A packed quart"The quart measure packed full" means the blossoms pressed down, not loosely heaped — roughly four cups of compressed petals and heads. Volume measures of a fluffy ingredient vary enormously depending on how hard they are pressed, which is why the book specifies packing.
- Dissolved yeastAt this period this would most likely mean a cake of baker's yeast crumbled or dissolved in warm water, household wine yeasts not being generally available. Baker's yeast will ferment a flower wine but is less alcohol-tolerant than a modern wine strain, and the result is unlikely to resemble a modern country wine.
- Lukewarm mattersAdding yeast to hot syrup kills it outright. "Lukewarm" here is about body temperature, and the boiling and cooling stage is doing double duty: dissolving the sugar and heating the syrup that the blossoms are then stirred into, before the yeast goes in.
- The earthen jarMost likely a glazed stoneware crock; the recipe does not say how it was covered. The three-times-daily stirring from the bottom keeps the blossom cap wet so it does not go mouldy on the surface — the same reason winemakers punch down a grape cap.
- The stray line at the end"Mint Fizzle." does not belong to this recipe; it appears to be a heading belonging to the following entry that has been carried onto this page.
Flower and vegetable wines were a standing feature of American and British household manuals well into the twentieth century: dandelion, elderflower, cowslip, parsnip, rhubarb — all cheap, all made from something growing in the yard at a moment when it was abundant and free. Dandelion wine in particular belonged to the first warm weeks of spring, and picking the blossoms is often said to have been children's work. Household Discoveries, a large early-1900s compendium of domestic practice rather than a cook's book proper, gathers such beverages alongside soaps, stain removers and household repairs, which tells you how these wines were regarded: not as a vintner's craft but as ordinary provisioning, one more thing a competent household turned out for itself. The long wait before bottling — this recipe says January — is the one piece of real winemaking discipline in it, allowing the wine to finish and drop clear before it was closed up.