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Splendid Ginger Beer
Mrs. H. L. Bristol.
Five gallons of water, one-half pound ginger root boiled, four pounds of sugar, one-eighth pound of cream of tartar, one bottle of essence of lemon, one ounce of tartaric acid, one quart of yeast.
A proportion list rather than a method, in the manner of most nineteenth-century beverage recipes. Scaled for a household making five gallons at once; the quantities divide cleanly for a smaller batch.
- The hinge: fermentation, not flavouringThe quart of yeast is doing real work here, eating the sugar and producing carbon dioxide. This is a live, actively fermenting drink, and the length of that ferment (unstated) is what determines whether you get a lively soft drink or a sour, mildly alcoholic small beer. Comparable recipes usually give it a day or so somewhere cool before chilling or drinking, but this one leaves the cook to judge.
- A quart of yeastThis means a wet household yeast -- barm saved from a previous batch or a home-raised hop or potato yeast -- not anything sold today. For five gallons, roughly a teaspoon of dry ale or bread yeast does the same job; a quart of modern yeast would be wildly excessive.
- Essence of lemonIn this period, essence of lemon is lemon oil dissolved in alcohol, sold in small vials. A whole bottle of it was perhaps a dram or two. Two teaspoons of lemon extract, or the zest of three or four lemons, gets you to the same place; a modern 2-oz bottle of extract would be harsh.
- Weights that read oddlyOne-eighth pound of cream of tartar is 2 ounces, about 6 tablespoons. Half a pound of ginger root is a substantial hand of it. The ounce of tartaric acid and the cream of tartar together supply the tartness.
- Boiling the gingerThe recipe says only that the ginger is boiled. In practice: bruise or slice the root, simmer it in part of the water, then dissolve the sugar and acids in the hot liquid and make up to five gallons with cold water. Add the yeast only once the liquid has cooled to lukewarm -- hot liquid will kill it.
- Bottling pressureA drink still fermenting in a sealed glass bottle will build serious pressure. Nineteenth-century households used stoneware crocks and thick returnable bottles and drank the result within days. If you bottle it, use plastic soda bottles, keep them cold, and open them over a sink.
- YieldFive gallons is about eighty cups. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible unless you are provisioning a haying crew, which is roughly what this quantity implies.
Ginger beer began as a British small beer: a cheap, lightly fermented household drink brewed in the kitchen rather than the brewhouse, popular from around the late eighteenth century onward and sold from stalls and corner shops through the Victorian era. Recipes like this one, with their sugar, acid, and a skim of barm, sit at the point where brewing and confectionery meet — the tartaric acid and cream of tartar sharpen the flavour and lend a fizzy bite that suggests the commercial ginger beers of the day. That it is credited to Mrs. H. L. Bristol is characteristic of The Home Cook Book, which was compiled from contributions by named ladies of Toronto and sold for charity — though the book is known to have lifted large amounts of text from earlier American compilations, so an attributed name is not evidence of any particular household's practice.