Welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host Jon Townsend today
we'll be making a raspberry wine that anyone can make in their very own home
thanks for joining us today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century.
It is berry season right now so in the last couple of weeks it's been mulberry season and
there's still some mulberries on the tree right this second it's right in the peak
of black raspberry season at least here in Indiana and in a few weeks when the raspberries
are gone blackberries will be available and then maybe even blueberries if we want something else
how can we use these into the future how can we get something that's berry flavored
you know months into the future well that's what today's recipe is how we can make a raspberry wine
and we could do the same thing with other kinds of berries depending on the seasonality of it
this recipe works really well with any kind of soft fruit. In the 18th century folks are always
thinking about how to preserve something you know very very seasonal we have a lot of raspberries
right now now we can pick them we can eat them as a cobbler or we can dry them to put in something
in the future or we can turn them into a liquid and that's exactly what they're thinking about in
these cookbooks from the 18th century and earlier so we've got a couple of different recipes here
raspberry wine shows up in probably almost every cookbook in some sense or other now when I think
a wine recipe I'm thinking about making wine with grapes and this is a very very long process
so you you pick the grapes at just the right time and you smash them and you let them ferment and
it takes months and months to go from here are our grapes ready to harvest to here's this bottle of
finished wine. Well that's not what this recipe is about at all these recipes almost all of them are
made wines in other words how do we get a flavored wine we're going to take wine already that's
that's made and we're going to add flavor to it we're going to preserve our our raspberry flavor
in this way so here's Powell's book of cookery which can be kind of an interesting cookbook
to to get into because the author sometimes he's expecting us to know certain things but
this is a nice short recipe that gives us the complete idea about what's going on.
Take ripe raspberries bruise them with the back of a spoon strain them fill a bottle with the juice
stop it but not very close set it by four or five days then pour it off from the dregs
and add there too as much rhenish or white wine as the juice will well color when that done
sweeten your wine with loaf sugar and when you're done you may bottle it for use. I thought this
was a good recipe but I want to know exactly what's going on and if there are any pitfalls
in a recipe like this and especially a cookbook like this you need to look at other recipes
so I went forward and backwards to look at different recipes because almost every
cookbook has them and I went to Hannah Glass's cookbook which is the total standby uh if you want
to find anything in the 18th century you look at Hannah Glass's to see what she has to say.
Her recipe is very very similar she changes the order a little bit she has fine raspberries she
bruises them with the back of a spoon she puts them through a flannel bag so
she tells us exactly how she's straining them off she puts them in a stone jar not a bottle.
And then she puts sugar in right away and then she lets them set
so notice what's happening in all of these is that what we're doing is we're letting these
raspberries ferment a little bit we're not taking this you know month-long process or whatever
to get alcohol out of them but we do want the the raspberries to give us a little
bit of whiny flavor we don't just take the juice right away and put it into our wine
we let them kind of create their own wine flavor but not not all the difficulty of it.
She only has she mixes the sugar with it and she lets it stand three days not four or five um
and then she mixes it with the wine and then she tells us here at the end it will be fit to drink
in a week and then I love this part brandy made thus is a very fine dram and a much better way
than steeping the raspberries so she says not only can you do this with a wine but you can make a
raspberry brandy or raspberry flavored brandy now sometimes they would do that by just tossing these
raspberries in right away but here it's like let them let them ferment for three or four days
now that was Hannah Glass and she's that middle of the 18th century time period but what happens
if we go back a hundred years what happens if what happens in the 1670's and that's what uh Digbie's
cookbook here is great for and it's got a lot of drink recipes so I said whoa this is you know we
definitely have to check out this one and he's doing something similar almost 100 years earlier
but it's definitely a different take he takes he starts off with four gallons of deal wine.
Now deal in the time period here is probably just means cheap an inexpensive wine so deal
wine you put it in an earthen jug you put in four gallons of raspberries that's a lot of raspberries
you let them stand so infusing seven days and then you press it out gently then infuse as many
more raspberries so three times if you please so it's like infused raspberries squeeze it out put
more raspberries in do it again then add as much fine sugar as will make it pleasant put it into a
keg a barrel close stopped and let it stay until it is fine and then put it into barrels so this is
the infusing method that Hannah Glass talked about so don't let the raspberries kind of ferment any
you just put them into the wine and you let them set that took that takes a lot of raspberries
whereas this these recipes don't take nearly as many raspberries but you let them get intense
flavor by letting them ferment a little bit let's get started on this recipe first question is how
many raspberries do I really need for this. These recipes all vary tremendously so Digbie's which
is just infusion you need as many raspberries as you have wine as much juice maybe three or four
times over we're not going to do that these black raspberries are very difficult to get
they're you know they're these are precious that's all there is to it so i'm not going to do that.
Powell's says you need just enough of this juice to color the wine we're going to be doing
a standard bottle of wine here um so we probably don't need more than about a pint of juice to get
a pint of juice we're going to need more than a pint of berries so we're going to be working with
maybe a quart of berries to about a quart of wine you know depending on the berries you're going
to be using these are black raspberries you might need more or less to kind of get a little bit more
flavor maybe mulberries you probably need a little bit more black raspberries you know you don't need
as much because they are very flavorful especially these wild ones so I've got about a quart here
we're going to pour these into a bowl that we can mash them into.
We've got about half our berries in the bowl our bowl isn't big enough to do them all at once
we've got our spoon all these recipes sort of call for using a spoon not a masher we're not
trying to grind these we don't want to break the seeds themselves we just want to gently
mash all the little cells you can kind of see
these berries are made with all all these multiple cells of raspberries we want to break the cell
wall bring all those all the flavors all the liquids out but we don't want to break the seeds.
Our berries are all mashed up if it were me I would let it ferment just like this but that's
not what the recipes call for they want to strain that liquid off and leave that pulp behind that's
what we're going to do on. Townsend's plus I did a behind the scenes video where we talked through or
I talked through the method here you know it's not explicit in some of these recipes it is in others
I would have thought that straining it was the best way to do that but it turns out that
Hannah Glass's method of using the cloth the cloth bag or flannel bag as she says
to get the most juice well that's really the best way to do it that's this won't
get all the juice and it'll leave some things behind that we don't want the cloth bag really
is going to be the best way to get the maximum juice out of this we don't want to waste a bit.
Let's follow Hannah glass's recipe and that is with that we put the sugar
in next Powell's you waited you let it ferment and then you put the sugar in
here we're going to add sugar in immediately I think because it'll speed up the fermentation
I think she only has it ferment three days so we're gonna add in
about a cup of sugar to our pint or so maybe it's a little bit more of our juice and I'm just gonna
guess here I mean it is to taste really it's not an exact thing if you want it sweeter
add a little more let's stir this to get that sugar all mixed in and hopefully mostly dissolved.
Our batch is ready to ferment we need to put it in our fermenting vessel one recipe
calls for a bottle or Hannah Glass a stone jar this is going to be perfect for that
make sure that it's very clean on the inside we don't want bacteria
or any kind of fungus to take over we want the natural yeast to start to ferment.
Our juice is ready to set aside and ferment now the recipes are to put a lid on this
that so that it can breathe we don't want it to pressurize so don't put this in a jar and
you know cork it up tight or you know tighten the jar down we do want to let it do its
thing hopefully a little bit of yeast will take over naturally on the outside of the fruit
other things could happen it could get mold, bacteria, fungus if that happens well you should
probably just throw it out in the time period they probably just scrape it off and keep going
um but we're going to set this aside for three days not in the refrigerator we do want it to
work so room temperature not hot but you know 70 75. we're gonna set this aside for three days.
Here's a batch that I started three days ago this should be ready to mix up right now
it's got a good smell to it it's not exactly like fresh berries like a little bit of something is
happening which is exactly what the recipe was looking for so it's time to add this to our wine
and the wine we're using here the recipes call for a mountain wine which is a white wine and
let's pick something that's a little on the sweet side this is going to end up being a dessert wine
it already has sugar in it so we want to start with something that's a slightly sweet white wine
now this is supposed to age for at least a week probably two weeks a month would be even better
but we're going to try it out right now we want to get an idea
about where this is going where it starts out at so this is the start right.
It's got really really good raspberry flavor but I think I know what's going to happen right
now it feels like two different things like fresh raspberries and wine but we want this to turn into
raspberry wine that's what I'm thinking this two weeks three weeks a month and
even maybe even longer will really solidify this into raspberry wine like
proper like we fermented raspberries and you know it took months and months to make and all that so
when this is ready we're going to try this out in a live stream
I can't wait to taste what this really ends up being like. If you'd like another episode
that's similar with some a little different flavors try out this cherry bounce recipe