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Beverages: Ginger
Ginger Beer. 6 ounces bruised ginger, 6 quarts water, 5 pounds loaf sugar, 1 gill lemon juice, pound honey, 17 quarts cold water, 1 egg, 2 teaspoonfuls essence lemon.
Boil the ginger and water for half an hour; then add the sugar, lemon juice, honey, the balance of the water, and strain through a cloth. When cold, put in the egg and esof lemon. After standing three or four days it may be bottled. sence Ginger Pop. 2 gallons lukewarm water, 2 pounds white sugar, 2 lemons, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 1 tablespoonful cream of tartar, 1 cupful yeast, 2 ounces white ginger root, bruised and boiled.
Pour this mixture into a stone jar and stand in a warm place for twenty-four hours; then bottle. The next day it will be ready to "pop."- MARION HARLAND.
Two nineteenth-century small-beer formulas: both rely on uncontrolled wild or baker's yeast fermentation, and the first drops a raw whole egg into a liquid that is never heated again. The notes below explain the archaic terms and then why neither should be attempted as printed.
- The raw egg is the first problemThe egg is a fining agent — beaten white was traditionally used to carry sediment out of a cloudy brew — but here a whole egg goes into cooled, unpasteurised liquid that then stands three or four days at room temperature before bottling. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the standing period is exactly what the organism wants.
- The bottling is the secondBoth recipes bottle a fermenting liquid with no measurement of residual sugar, no gravity reading, and no guidance on closures. Five pounds of sugar in the first (fermenting on whatever wild yeast it picks up, since none is added) and two pounds in the second are far more than can be consumed before the bottles are sealed; the carbon dioxide has nowhere to go. Glass bottles under uncontrolled secondary fermentation burst. A current, tested ginger beer recipe with specified sugar levels and pressure-rated bottles should be used instead.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So the lemon juice in the first recipe is about the yield of three or four lemons.
- "Pound honey"The line has lost a numeral in typesetting — it may be one pound or half a pound. This is one of several places where the original is genuinely ambiguous rather than merely archaic.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated sugar is the nearest modern equivalent; the chief difference is the form in which it was sold.
- Essence of lemonLemon oil dissolved in alcohol, of no standardised strength but generally far more concentrated than zest. Two teaspoonfuls in twenty-three quarts is a light touch, not a mistake.
- "Bruised ginger"Whole dried ginger root cracked with a mallet or the flat of a knife rather than grated, so it can be strained out cleanly. "White ginger root" in the second recipe means dried ginger that has been scraped or peeled, one of the commercial grades then sold.
- A cupful of yeastA liquid barm or homemade yeast starter of unknown strength, not a packet of dried yeast. There is no reliable modern equivalent, which is part of why the fermentation here cannot be controlled.
Ginger beer belongs to the family of "small beers" — lightly fermented, barely alcoholic household drinks brewed from sugar, water and a flavouring, made in quantity because a stone jar in a warm corner cost nothing to run. English ginger beer is generally traced to the eighteenth century, and by the time these two formulas were collected it was as much a summer refreshment as a brewer's product, made at home in batches of twenty-three quarts. The second is credited to Marion Harland, the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, one of the most widely read American domestic writers of the late nineteenth century, whose Common Sense in the Household (1871) went through edition after edition; her recipes were reprinted, borrowed and re-credited across dozens of compilations like this one. The instruction that it will be ready to "pop" the next day is a fair description of the whole genre — and of its central hazard.