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Ginger Wine
Mrs. Oliphant.
One-half pound of cinnamon bark, four ounces of pimento, two ounces of mace, three-quarters of an ounce of capsicum, three-quarters of a pound of ginger root, five gallons of alcohol; macerate and strain or filter, after standing fifteen days. Now make syrup, thirty pounds of white sugar, half pound of tartaric acid, one and a-half pounds of cream of tartar, dissolve with warm water, clarify with white of two eggs, and add soft water to make forty gallons. Colour with cochineal and let it stand six months before use.
This is a compounder's formula rather than a domestic one: a spiced alcoholic tincture cut with acidified sugar syrup to make forty gallons. Nothing ferments, so despite the name there is no wine-making here, and the whole thing hinges on the fifteen-day maceration being strained absolutely clear before the syrup goes in.
- Scale firstForty gallons is more than a standard barrel — roughly two hundred bottles. Divide every quantity by forty for a one-gallon trial: about 3/4 lb sugar, a heaped teaspoon and a half of tartaric acid, about 3/5 oz of cream of tartar, a pint of spirit and a few grams of each spice.
- What "alcohol" meantIn nineteenth-century formularies "alcohol" is cologne or grain spirit at about 95 percent, sold by druggists. Five gallons of it in forty gallons of finished liquid lands the drink near 12 percent, which is why the proportions look so lean. Undiluted neutral spirit at that strength is not generally retailed now; a high-proof neutral vodka is the practical stand-in, and the arithmetic changes accordingly.
- Pimento is allspiceNot sweet peppers and not paprika. Pimento here is the dried allspice berry. Capsicum, three-quarters of an ounce of it, is dried hot chilli — assertive even across forty gallons, and the first thing to reduce if you are scaling down and unsure.
- Ginger rootDried whole ginger, bruised, not fresh rhizome. Fresh ginger carries far more water and gives a brighter, shorter flavour that will not survive six months of standing the way dried does.
- The two acidsTartaric acid supplies the sharpness; cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) is only slightly soluble and some of it can be expected to settle out as sediment over the six months.
- Clarifying with egg whiteBeaten white stirred into warm — not hot — syrup coagulates as it heats and carries haze up as scum, which is skimmed off. Modern practice would simply filter the syrup.
- CochinealCochineal is carmine, the pigment from a scale insect, still legal as a food colour and still an allergen worth declaring. Here it is doing nothing but colouring the drink red.
- StrainingStrain or filter the spice tincture through paper or a fine cloth before combining. Any spice fines left in suspension will keep throwing sediment through the whole half-year rest.
Ginger wine of this kind was never a wine at all. Through the nineteenth century druggists and "compounders" made cordials by steeping spices in rectified spirit, then letting down the tincture with sugar syrup, acid and colour he same technish, and often the same shop, that produced flavouring essences and patent bitters. The spice list, heavy on cinnamon, allspice and mace with capsicum for heat, is the standard warming register of the period, and ginger wine itself was widely taken as a cold-weather drink and a domestic remedy for chills and indigestion — half beverage, half medicine, which is exactly the ambiguity such recipes lived in. The attribution to Mrs. Oliphant follows the pattern of The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877), which was compiled from recipes contributed by ladies of Toronto and other places, drawing on the earlier Chicago book, in aid of a children's hospital.