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Red Currant Wine
Mrs. Betts.
For every gallon of water take one gallon of currants off the stalks, bruise well and let them stand over night. Next morning mash them well with your hands and strain through a hair sieve. To every gallon of the liquor add four pounds of sugar. Rinse the cask well with brandy and strain the liquor again when putting in, by which you will see whether the sugar is dissolved. Lay the bung lightly on and stop it up in ten days.
BOSTON CREAM (A SUMMER DRINK).
Mrs. Kerr.
Make a syrup of four pounds of white sugar with four quarts of water; boil; when cold add four ounces of tartaric acid, one and a-half ounces of essence of lemon, and the whites of six eggs beaten to a stiff froth; bottle. A wineglass of the cream to a tumbler of water, with sunsient carbonate of soda to make it effervesce.
Two separate entries from different contributors run together here: Mrs. Betts's red currant wine and Mrs. Kerr's bottled summer cordial. The wine is a conventional fruit ferment; the cordial is the reason for the caution.
- Why the caution appliesThe second entry has six raw egg whites beaten into a sugar syrup that has been boiled and then cooled, bottled, and drawn on by the wineglass over days or weeks. The eggs themselves are never heated, and a sweet acid syrup held at room temperature is a hospitable place for Salmonella from the shell or the white. Use a current recipe if you want a lemon effervescing drink.
- The wine's proportionsEqual volumes of fruit and water, then four pounds of sugar per gallon of strained juice. That sugar load is aimed at a sweet, fairly strong wine; the original assumes a wild ferment from yeasts on the fruit, with no cultured yeast, hydrometer or acid reading anywhere in the instruction.
- "Stop it up in ten days"This is the hinge and the risk in the wine. Sealing a cask ten days into a primary ferment on four pounds of sugar per gallon can leave active fermentation trapped behind a tight bung, and the pressure has to go somewhere. Modern practice is an airlock until fermentation has genuinely finished.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, used because it was fine, cheap and did not react with fruit acid. A nylon straining bag or a double layer of muslin does the same job.
- Rinsing the cask with brandyThe spirit rinse was a common way of sweetening and cleaning a cask before use, and it is not adequate sanitation by current standards. Sulphite solution is what a home winemaker uses now to prepare vessels.
- Currants off the stalksCurrant stems carry hard tannin and green flavours, which is the usual reason for stripping fruit before crushing, though the recipe gives no reason itself. Stripping is quicker if the fruit is frozen first, which also helps the berries give up juice when bruised.
Red currant was one of the great British and North American cottage wines of the nineteenth century, valued because the fruit is naturally high in acid and crops heavily in cool gardens where grapes will not ripen. Household books of the 1870s, including this one, carry a whole shelf of such recipes -- currant, gooseberry, elderberry, rhubarb, dandelion -- contributed by name, as here, by women in the compiling community. The Home Cook Book was assembled in Toronto in 1877 from such donated receipts, sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and the attribution to "Mrs. Betts" or "Mrs. Kerr" is part of the point: these were vouched-for family formulas, passed along with the assumption that the reader already knew what a cask and a bung were. The Boston cream that follows belongs to a different genre entirely, the home-made acid-and-soda fizz that stood in for bottled soda water before commercial carbonation was cheap.