Lemon Wine
INGREDIENTS.-To 4½ gallons of water allow the pulp of 50 lemons, the rind of 25, 16 lbs. of loaf sugar, 1/2 1/2 oz. of isinglass, 1 bottle of brandy.
Peel and slice the lemons, but use only the rind of 25 of them and put them into the cold water. Let it stand 8 or 9 days, squeezing the lemons well every day; then strain the water off and put it into a cask with the sugar. Let it work some time; and when it has ceased working, put in the isinglass. Stop the cask down; in about 6 months put in the brandy and bottle the wine off.
SEASONABLE. The best time to make this is in January or February, when lemons are best and cheapest.
A country wine on a Victorian household scale — roughly twenty-five bottles at a time. The quantities scale down cleanly, but the fermentation needs more attention than the original text implies.
- The scale4½ gallons here are imperial gallons, about 20.5 litres or 5.4 US gallons, and the finished volume runs to two dozen bottles or more. Divide the whole recipe by five for a manageable 4-litre batch: 10 lemons' pulp, the rind of 5, a little over 3 lb sugar.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the same thing in a more convenient form; use it by weight.
- Rind, not pithAll the lemons are peeled, but only half the rinds go into the steep, and the peel should be pared thin. White pith left on the rind through an eight- or nine-day cold steep can turn the wine harshly bitter, and that bitterness is unlikely to age out.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe names no yeast at all, and presumably relies on wild yeast from the fruit and the air; it says only to "let it work some time". Modern practice is to pitch a measured wine yeast, because the alternative is an unpredictable ferment and a real chance of vinegar or spoilage organisms winning.
- "Stop the cask down" is the dangerous instructionSealing a vessel that is still fermenting builds pressure until something gives. Ferment under an airlock and only close the container once activity has genuinely stopped — no bubbles for several days and a stable hydrometer reading over a week.
- IsinglassA fining agent made from fish swim bladders, added to drop the haze. It is still sold for brewing, though gelatin, bentonite or a proprietary wine fining does the same job; half an ounce is the dose for the full 4½ gallons.
- SanitationNothing in the original addresses cleaning. Sterilise every vessel, tube and bottle before use.
- The brandy and the six monthsOne bottle of brandy across 20 litres raises the strength only slightly; it is there as a preservative and for smoothness, not fortification. The six-month wait before bottling is sound — the wine is unpleasantly raw before then, and a year is better still.
Fruit wines like this one belonged to the still-room rather than the kitchen: a domestic economy in which a glut of cheap fruit was converted into something that would keep. Beeton's note on seasonableness is the whole logic of the recipe — imported lemons reached Britain in bulk in the winter months, arriving from Sicily, Spain and Portugal, and January and February were when they were at their best and cheapest. Fifty lemons at once was a January purchase, not an everyday one. Lemon wine, along with ginger, cowslip, elderflower and parsnip wines, filled the gap for households that could not afford much imported grape wine but had sugar, fruit and a cask; the bottle of brandy stirred in at the end was both a stabiliser and a nod towards the taste of the real thing. Isinglass was a common clarifier for beer and wine in Britain, and Russian sturgeon isinglass was reckoned the prized grade, though by the mid-nineteenth century supplies also came from elsewhere.