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Ginger Cordial
Two ounces of ginger root, three pounds of sugar, one gallon of water; boil well, add two lemons, cut in slices, put in yeast and let it stand a few days, when it will be ready for use.
A small-batch fermented ginger beer under an older name. Everything about it is workable except the two things the original leaves out: how much yeast, and where the liquid sits while it works.
- Cool the wort before the yeast goes inThe instruction to "put in yeast" follows immediately after boiling, but yeast pitched into hot liquid is killed and nothing happens; anything much above blood heat begins to stress it, and it will not survive water hot to the touch. Let the sweetened liquid come down to blood heat first.
- The yeast quantity is missingNo amount is given, and the period cook would have used a spoonful of ale barm or a fragment of a compressed cake — neither has a clean modern equivalent. Any conversion here would be invention; use the pitching rate on a current packet of ale or bread yeast.
- Ginger root, dried not freshTwo ounces of "ginger root" in a beverage recipe of this vintage most likely means dried whole hands of ginger, bruised before use, rather than fresh rhizome. Fresh is milder by weight and far more perfumed, so the finished drink may taste quite different from what was intended.
- Sugar loadThree pounds to the gallon is a heavy syrup — more than most modern ginger beers — and there is far more sugar present than a few days of fermentation will consume. The result is sweet and only lightly alcoholic.
- Do not seal it in strong bottlesAn active ferment left in a corked or capped bottle builds pressure fast at this sugar level, and glass has been known to burst. Ferment under a loose cover or an airlock, and if you bottle it, use vessels rated for pressure and refrigerate.
- "A few days" depends on the roomAt 70F this will be visibly working within a day and drinkable in three or four; a cold pantry may take a week. Judge by the bubbles slowing rather than by the calendar.
- LemonsTwo whole lemons in slices, peel and all, will give noticeable pith bitterness over several days. Strain the fruit out once the flavour is where you want it rather than leaving it in to the end.
- YieldRoughly a gallon, allowing for boiling loss against the volume the dissolved sugar adds, so on the order of thirty-two half-cup servings — a quantity that makes sense for a household, less so for one cook.
"Cordial" in an American cookbook can cover a sweetened spirit or liqueur — blackberry cordial and the like — but it also covers any sweetened, flavoured drink kept on hand for guests, for hot weather, or for the sick-room, and this one sits squarely in the family of small beers — root beer, spruce beer, ginger beer — that households brewed with a bit of yeast and drank within days rather than aging. Ginger itself was a settled pantry staple, imported dried and cheap, and it was valued as much for its reputed effect on the stomach as for its taste, which is part of why ginger drinks were considered wholesome enough to offer children and invalids. The recipe's vagueness about yeast is typical: barm was whatever was to hand from the bread crock or the brewer, and a cook was expected to know a spoonful by eye. That these quick ferments were treated as beverages rather than as liquor says something about where the line between the two was drawn.