Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
In addition, this page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Another (Take of cold soft water galls) (II)
Take of cold soft water, 19 galls.; Malaga raisins, 50 lbs.; white tartar, in powder, 4 oz. Ferment. Mix ginger, in powder or bruised 20 oz.; 18 lemons, peel and juice; add brandy, 2 qts. or more. This will make 18 galls.
Another. Take 20 qts. of water; 5 lbs. of sugar; 3 oz. of white ginger; 1 oz. of stick liquorice.
Boil them well together; when it is cold put a little new yeast upon it, but not too much; then put it into the barrel for 10 days, and after that bottle it putting a lump of white sugar into every bottle.
Another. To 7 galls. of water put 19 lbs. of clayed sugar, and boil it for 1/2 an hour, taking off the scum as it rises; then take a small quantity of the liquor and add to it 9 oz. of the best ginger bruised. Now put it all together, and when nearly cold, chop 9 lbs. of raisins very small, and put them into an 8 gall. cask (beer measure), with 1 oz. of isinglass. Slice 4 lemons into the cask, taking out all the seeds, and yeast. Leave it unstopped for 3 weeks, and in about 3 months it will be fit for bottling.
There will be 1 gall. of the sugar and water more than the cask will hold at first; this must be kept to fill up as the liquor works off, as it is necessary that the cask should be kept full till it has done working. The raisins should be Malaga, and 1/3 Muscadel. Spring and autumn are the best seasons for making this wine.
To make Koumiss, a Tartar Wine.
Take of fresh mare's milk any quantity; add to it & part of water, and pour the mixture into a wooden vessel. Use as a ferment part of skimmed milk; but at any future preparation a small portion of old koumiss will answer better.
Cover the vessel with a thick cloth, and set it in a place of moderate warmth; leaving it at rest for 24 hours; at the end of which time the milk will become sour, and a thick substance will be gathered on its top. Now, with a churn staff, beat it till the thick substance above-mentioned be blended intimately with the subjacent fluid.
In this situation leave it at rest for 24 hours more; after which pour it into a higher and narrower vessel, resembling a churn, where the agitation must be repeated as before, till the liquor appears to be perfectly homogeneous. In this state it is called koumiss; of which the taste ought to be a pleasant mixture of sweet and sour.
Agitation must be employed every time before it is used. Sometimes aromatic herbs, as Angelica, are infused in the liquor during fermentation.
To make Rhubarb Wine.
Take of sliced rhubarb, 24 oz.; lesser cardamom seeds, bruised and husked, 1/2 oz.; saffron, 2 drs. Spanish white wine, 2 pints; proof spirit, 1/2 pint. Digest for 10 days and strain. This is a warm, cordial, laxative medicine. It is used chiefly in weakness of the stomach and bowels, and some kinds of looseness. It may be given in doses of from spoonful to 3 or 4 spoonfuls or more, according to the circumstances of the disorder and the strength of the patient.
To make Sage Wine.
Boil 26 quarts of spring-water of an hour, and when it is blood warm put 25 lbs. of Malaga raisins picked, rubbed and shred, into it, with almost 1/2 bushel of red sage shred, and a small pitcher of ale yeast; stir all well together and let it stand in a tub covered warm 6 or 7 days, stirring it once a day; then strain it off and put it in a runlet. Let it work 3 or 4 days, and then stop it up; when it has stood 6 or 7 days, put in a quart or two of Malaga Sherry, and when it is fine bottle it.
To make Turnip Wine.
Pare and slice a number of turnips, put them into a cider press and press out all the juice. To every gallon of the juice add 3 lbs. of lump sugar; have a vessel ready large enough to hold the juice, and put 1/2 pint of brandy to every gallon. Pour in the juice and lay something over the bung for a week, to see if it works; if it does, do not bung it down till it has done working; then stop it close for 3 months, and draw it off into another vessel. When it is fine bottle it off.
This is an excellent wine for gouty habits, and is much recommended in such cases in lieu of any other wine.
Rose Wine.
Take a well-glazed earthen vessel and put into it 3 galls. of rose-water drawn with a cold still.
Put into that a sufficient quantity of rose-leaves, cover it close and set it for an hour in a kettle or copper of hot water, to take out the whole strength and tincture of the roses; and when it is cold press the rose-leaves hard into the liquor, and steep fresh ones in it, repeating it till the liquor has got the full strength of the roses. To every gallon of liquor put 3 lbs. of loaf sugar, and stir it well, that it may melt and disperse in every part. Then put it into a cask or other convenient vessel, to ferment, and put into it a piece of bread toasted hard and covered with yeast. Let it stand about 30 days, when it will be ripe and have a fine flavor, having the whole strength and scent of the roses in it; and it may be greatly improved by adding to it wine and spices. By this method of infusion, wine of carnations, clove gilliflowers, violets, primroses, or any other flower having a curious scent, may be made.
English Fig Wine.
Take the large blue figs when pretty ripe, and steep them in white wine, having made some slits in them, that they may swell and gather in the substance of the wine. Then slice some other figs and let them simmer over a fire in water until they are reduced to a kind of pulp. Then strain out the water, pressing the pulp hard, and pour it as hot as possible on the figs that are imbrued in the wine. Let the quantities be nearly equal, but the water somewhat more than the wine and figs.
Let them stand 24 hours, mash them well together,
This is a run of country-wine formulas from the same chapter rather than a single recipe, and they are not all of a kind: three are conventional ginger-and-raisin ferments, one is a fortified turnip wine, one is a flower infusion, and two — the koumiss and the rhubarb wine — belong to the medicine chest rather than the cellar. Notes on the workable ones follow, then the reasons the other two fail.
- Why the cautionThe koumiss is raw mare's milk soured at "moderate warmth" for two days with no heat treatment and no measured acidity, which is precisely the route by which Brucella, Salmonella, E. coli O157 and Listeria reach the drinker; wild souring does not reliably drop the pH fast enough to control them. The rhubarb wine is not a beverage at all but a dosed laxative tincture of rhubarb in spirit — the recipe says only "sliced rhubarb," though the medicinal wording points to the officinal root rather than the garden stalk — complete with saffron by the dram and instructions to give it by the spoonful to the weak. Neither should be reproduced; if you want a cultured milk drink or a rhubarb cordial, use a current recipe.
- Which gallonBefore 1826 an English wine gallon was 231 cubic inches, about 3.8 L (the modern US gallon), while the ale gallon was 282 cubic inches. The third recipe's "8 gall. cask (beer measure)" is a reminder that the two systems coexisted. Which standard is meant elsewhere in the run is not stated; treat all the gallon figures as approximate.
- Sugar and yeast terms"White tartar" is powdered cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate), used to acidify a low-acid must. "Clayed sugar" is raw cane sugar partly purified by claying — a light brown sugar is the nearest thing. "Ale yeast" and "a little new yeast" mean barm skimmed off a working beer; a sachet of dried wine yeast, rehydrated, does the job with far more predictable results.
- Isinglass and other finingsThe ounce of isinglass in the third recipe is a clarifier made from sturgeon swim bladder, added to drop yeast and other suspended solids. Modern isinglass, gelatin or bentonite finings are sold by the gram with dosing rates; one ounce in an eight-gallon cask is a heavy hand by current practice.
- Vessels and airlocks"Leave it unstopped for 3 weeks" and "lay something over the bung" are the period's way of venting fermentation gas while excluding flies. A fermentation lock does the same thing without inviting acetic bacteria, and the reserved gallon of sugar-water for topping up is still exactly right practice once the ferment slows.
- Blood warm, and the sage"Blood warm" is about 95–100°F, the temperature at which you can pitch yeast without killing it. The "almost bushel of red sage shred" in the sage wine is an unqualified quantity — a bushel is 8 dry gallons of loose leaf, which is a very large amount even shredded; the original is ambiguous about how far short of a bushel to stop, so start with a few loosely packed quarts.
- Bottling with sugarThe lump of white sugar per bottle in the second recipe primes a secondary fermentation for fizz. In modern glass this is how bottles are made to explode; use bottles rated for pressure, keep the priming sugar to a few grams, and be aware the ginger beer will keep working.
- FortifyingThe brandy in these wines acts chiefly as a preservative; in the raisin wine it goes in after the ferment, though in the turnip wine it is in the cask before the juice has worked at all. The addition raises the finished strength by only a few per cent, so this is a lightly fortified wine rather than anything near port. The claim that it suits "gouty habits" was wrong then and is wrong now.
- Rose wine and yieldThe rose recipe depends on repeated infusion of fresh petals into cold-distilled rose water — use unsprayed petals only, since garden roses are routinely treated. The 19-gallon raisin wine yields 18 gallons, which is a cellar's worth; quarter or eighth the quantities for a domestic batch.
Mackenzie's compilations belong to a long English tradition of household "made wines" — ferments built on raisins, sugar, garden fruit, roots and flowers because grapes would not ripen reliably in Britain and imported wine carried duty. Ginger wine of the kind in the first three receipts was a staple of that tradition, cheap to build from sugar, dried Malaga fruit and spice, and drunk warm against winter. The koumiss entry is a different sort of item altogether: fermented mare's milk from the Central Asian steppe, known in Europe chiefly through travellers' and physicians' accounts, and enthusiastically recommended in the nineteenth century as a tonic for consumption and wasting — which is why it sits here beside a rhubarb tincture and a turnip wine "much recommended" for gout. The line between the still-room and the dispensary was thin in books of this type, and the same chapter will happily give you a drink for the table and a dose for the patient without changing tone.