Wine
Be sure to get perfectly ripe fruit for making wine, but do not gather it immediately after rain, as it is watery then and less sweet than usual. Be very careful to stop the wine securely as soon as fermentation ceases, as other wise it will lose its strength and flavor. Watch carefully to see when fermentation ceases.
Strawberry wine makes a delicious flavoring for syllabub, cake, jelly, etc., and so does gooseberry wine. Dewberries make a prettier and better wine than blackberries, and have all the medicinal virtues of the latter. The clearest wine is made without straining, by the following process: Take a tub or barrel (a flour-barrel for instance), and make a little pen of sticks of wood at the bottom. On top of this pen lay an armful of clean straw. Bore a hole in the side of the tub or barrel as near the bottom as possible, and set it on a stool or box so as to admit of setting a vessel underneath it. After mashing the berries intended for wine, put them on top the straw, and let the juice drain through it and run through the hole at the side of the tub or barrel into the vessel set beneath to catch it. Be careful to have this vessel large enough to avoid its being overrun. Any open stone vessel not used before for pickle will answer, or a bucket or other wooden vessel may be used. Let the berries remain on the straw and drain from evening till the next morning. Some persons make a slight variation on the process above described, by pouring hot water over the berries after putting them on the straw. After the draining is over, an inferior sort of wine may be made by squeezing the berries.
The following process will make wine perfectly clear: To a half-gallon of wine put two wine-glasses of sweet milk. Stir it into the wine and pour it all in a transparent half-gallon bottle. Stop it and set it by for twenty-four hours, at the end of which time the wine will be beautifully clear, the sediment settling with the milk at the bottom. Pour off the wine carefully into another bottle, not allowing any of the sediment or milk to get into the fresh bottle. The same directions apply to vinegar.
This is a set of general directions rather than a formulated recipe: no fruit weights, sugar quantities or timings are given, because the book's individual berry-wine recipes supply those. Read it as the technique that sits behind them.
- Stoppering is the dangerous partThe instruction to "stop the wine securely as soon as fermentation ceases" assumes you can judge that by eye. If any sugar is left, a sealed bottle will build pressure and can burst. Modern practice is to confirm with a hydrometer that the gravity has been stable for several days before sealing anything.
- Wine-glass measureA wine-glass in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is about 2 fluid ounces, or a quarter cup. Two wine-glasses of milk to a half-gallon of wine is therefore roughly half a cup.
- "Sweet milk"This means fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to buttermilk or clabber. The technique is casein fining and is still used commercially, though skim milk is preferred: butterfat can leave a haze or a faint dairy note.
- The straw filterStraw acted as a coarse strainer that let juice run clear without pressing. It is also a route for wild yeast, mould and field bacteria. If you want the same effect now, a nylon straining bag in a bucket with a spigot does the job with none of the uncertainty.
- Free-run versus pressed juiceThe overnight drip is what winemakers call free-run juice, and the note that squeezing yields "an inferior sort of wine" still holds. Pressing extracts more tannin, pulp and colour along with the juice, and the result is coarser.
- DewberriesDewberries are trailing brambles closely related to blackberries, ripening earlier and often reckoned sweeter. If you cannot find them, blackberries substitute directly; the book's preference is a matter of flavour, not chemistry.
- The vessel warning"Any open stone vessel not used before for pickle" is sound advice, most likely because a crock that has held vinegar brine can harbour acetic acid bacteria in crazed glaze, and those will turn wine to vinegar. Use glass, food-grade plastic or stainless steel.
- Hot water over the berriesThe optional scald loosens pulp and extracts more colour, and it knocks back some wild organisms. It also sets pectin in some fruit, which can leave a permanent haze that the milk fining will not fully clear.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from Virginia households at a moment when domestic fruit wine was an ordinary part of provisioning rather than a hobby. Strawberry, gooseberry, blackberry and dewberry wines were made in quantity from what the garden and hedgerow produced, and they served three purposes at once: a flavouring for syllabub, cake and jelly, as the entry says; a sociable drink; and a household medicine, since blackberry and dewberry cordials were long relied on for summer bowel complaints. The milk-fining trick is older than the book and is not folklore: casein binds tannins and suspended solids and drags them to the bottom, and egg white, isinglass and milk were the standard clearing agents of the period. The straw-and-stick false bottom is the same principle as a mash tun's, improvised out of a flour barrel.