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Ginger Wine (II)
Mrs. Betts.
INGREDIENTS: Ten gallons of water, one pound bruised ginger, thirty-two pounds raw sugar, ten lemons, ten Seville Oranges, four pounds of raisins, one-half ounce of isinglass. Peel the fruit, and extract the juice. Boil the water, ginger, and sugar half an hour; pour it boiling hot upon the peel; add the juice. When nearly cold put in a little yeast spread upon a toast. Let it stand three days, stirring it twice a day; then put it into a cask with the raisins and isinglass. Continue stirring twice a day for ten days. It must not be stopped till it has ceased to ferment. Fit for use in three months.
A ten-gallon batch of country wine, written for a household with a cellar and a cask. Everything here still works, but the scale, the finings and the closing instruction all need translating.
- Scale it down firstTen gallons is somewhere between 50 and 60 standard wine bottles, depending on whether the gallon is read as US or imperial (an 1870s Canadian book most likely means imperial). Divided by ten, a one-gallon test batch is 1 gallon water, 1.6 oz bruised ginger, 3 lb 3 oz raw sugar, 1 lemon, 1 Seville orange, 6.4 oz raisins and a pinch of isinglass or other finings.
- The hinge: do not seal it early"It must not be stopped till it has ceased to ferment" is the one line that matters. A tightly bunged cask or a screwed-down jar full of active must will build enough CO2 pressure to blow the closure or burst the glass. Use an airlock, or a loose cover, until bubbling has genuinely stopped for several days.
- Yeast spread upon a toastThis was baker's or brewer's barm floated in on a piece of bread, which acted as a carrier and kept the yeast at the surface. A packet of wine yeast plus yeast nutrient does the same job far more reliably; pitch it when the liquid is below about 80F, bearing in mind that "nearly cold" in an unheated nineteenth-century kitchen may have been cooler than a modern room.
- IsinglassIsinglass is a collagen finings made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and related fish, used to clear and stabilise the wine rather than to flavour it. Modern equivalents are gelatin, bentonite or a proprietary wine finings; it can also simply be left out and the wine given longer to drop clear.
- Seville orangesThe bitter marmalade orange, in season roughly January to February and rarely stocked otherwise. If you cannot get them, the usual stand-in is regular orange peel with extra lemon juice for acidity, but the bitterness that balances all that sugar will be softer.
- Raw sugar and the resulting strengthRaw sugar here means unrefined cane sugar, closer to today's turbinado or demerara than to white. At about 3.2 lb per gallon the must is very sweet, with a potential alcohol somewhere around 16 percent; the wild or barm yeasts available in the period would likely have quit before fermenting all of it, leaving a wine both sweet and strong.
- SanitationThe original simply says "a cask," and a period household would have cleaned it as best it could. Sterilise glass or food-grade plastic with a brewing sanitiser instead. Ten days of ferment with twice-daily stirring gives air plenty of access and invites acetobacter, so keep the vessel covered with cloth between stirrings.
- Timing and yieldTiming -- "Fit for use in three months" is optimistic by modern taste; ginger wine of this strength improves over a year in bottle. Rack off the raisins and lees once fermentation ends rather than leaving them in for the whole period.
Ginger wine belongs to the English tradition of household "country wines" — fermented drinks built from sugar, water and whatever aromatics or fruit were on hand, rather than from grapes. It was cheap, warming and widely regarded as medicinal: ginger, lemon and a sweet fermented liquid were exactly what a nineteenth-century household reached for against chills and damp. The Seville oranges point to a winter batch, made in the short weeks when bitter oranges arrived alongside the marmalade-making season, and the isinglass and cask show a kitchen still equipped for cellar work. The Home Cook Book, compiled from the contributions of ladies in Toronto and other cities in the 1870s, carries a good deal of this borrowed British domestic technology, attributed by name to the woman who supplied it — here Mrs. Betts.