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To Make Ginger Wine
To make Cherry Port.
RECIPE No. 11.
To 15 gals. prepared cherry juice, add : 66 30 alcohol, 90 per cent, “ 30 Catalonia or Marseilles wine, 3 oz. essence of noyau, + 1/2 lb. ground cinnamon infused in 1/2 gal. water, " 66 " cloves " 1 quart " 3 mace infused in alcohol, 95 per cent.
Filter, and add water to make the wine any degree of strength you desire.
To Prepare Cherry Juice by Infusion for making Cherry Port, Bounce, and Brandy.
RECIPE No. 12.
Put the cherries into barrels and cover them with spirit, 95 per cent; let them steep for a month, and stir them well every eight days. Use the juice that runs off first, and repeat this operation two or three times. The last time, you may bruise your cherries and stones, and steep them altogether to make cherry brandy.
To Prepare Cherry Juice by Boiling.
RECIPE No. 13.
Put the cherries in a kettle tinned inside, cover them with water, and boil them at a gentle heat for one hour. When cold, put them into barrels and add 1 gal. spirit, 95 per cent, to each 10 gals. of the juice.
To make Ginger Wine.
RECIPE No. 14.
To 10 gals. spirit, 95 per cent, add : 5 lbs. ginger root,
This page belongs to the compounding trade rather than the kitchen: it builds "wine" from high-proof spirit, fruit infusion and flavouring essences. Several of its instructions cannot be carried out safely or legally today, and the ingredient list for the ginger wine breaks off after the first item.
- Cherry stones are the central problemRecipe No. 12 directs that the cherries and stones be bruised and steeped together for cherry brandy. Cherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted; alcohol extracts it efficiently and a month-long infusion of deliberately broken stones is exactly the wrong technique.
- Essence of noyauNoyau flavouring of this period was made from bitter almonds or peach and cherry kernels, and carried the same cyanogenic compounds. Three ounces is a flavouring dose in a batch of this size, but the material itself is not something a home maker can source or verify.
- "Spirit, 95 per cent"This means neutral spirit at roughly 95 per cent alcohol by volume — near-azeotropic ethanol sold to the trade. It is not the same as 95 proof, which would be about 47 per cent. Retail spirits do not reach this strength in most jurisdictions, and diluting industrial or denatured alcohol is not a substitute.
- The quantities do not survive intactIn Recipe No. 11 the printed text is garbled: the gallon figures for the alcohol (given at 90 per cent, not 95) and the Catalonia wine are surrounded by stray characters, and the weight of ground cinnamon and the volume of infusion water are missing outright. A formula whose proportions cannot be read with confidence cannot be scaled or reproduced.
- The ginger wine itselfRecipe No. 14 gives 10 gallons of 95 per cent spirit and 5 lbs of ginger root, then stops. The sugar, water and any secondary flavourings that would have followed are absent, and what remains is a spirit infusion rather than a wine. Use a current ginger wine recipe if you want the drink.
- Catalonia and Marseilles wineThese were cheap, strong, deeply coloured southern French and Spanish blending wines bought by the cask for exactly this purpose. Nothing sold under those names now corresponds to them; the nearest idea is a robust unfortified red or a rough tawny.
- "A kettle tinned inside"Tinned copper or iron was the standard acid-safe vessel of the period. Modern stainless steel serves the same function; old tinned ware may have lead-bearing solder and should not be used for a long boil with fruit acid.
- FilteringThe instruction to filter meant passing the liquid through a cone of felt or flannel, sometimes over sand or charcoal, to clarify it. It removes haze and some colour; it does nothing to remove cyanogenic compounds or to make a mis-measured formula sound.
Books of this kind — and The French Wine and Liquor Manufacturer was among the best known in nineteenth-century America — were written for grocers, hotel keepers and rectifiers who bought neutral spirit by the barrel and turned it into whatever the customer would pay for: port, cognac, noyau, ginger wine. The trade was open about the method, publishing formulas that combined plain alcohol with a cheap base wine, sugar, spices and proprietary essences, then instructing the buyer to "add water to make the wine any degree of strength you desire." Ginger wine had a respectable place in this catalogue: in Britain it was a genuine domestic ferment of sugar, water, bruised ginger root and lemon, drunk warm against cold weather and sold at Victorian sweet shops as a soft cordial. Compounders reproduced its flavour far more quickly by macerating ginger in spirit and sweetening the result.