Old-Time Recipes for Home Made Wines Cordials & Liqueurs 1909 by Helen S. Wright
Gather the fruit dry, weigh, and bruise it, and to every eight pounds of fruit add one gallon of water; boil the water, pour it on the fruit scalding hot. Let it stand for two days; then draw it off, put it into a clean cask, and to every gallon of liquor add two and one-half pounds of good sugar. Fill the cask. It may be bottled off after standing in the cask a year. On bottling the wine, put a small lump of loaf sugar into every bottle.
DAMSON, OR BLACK CHERRY WINE
Damson, or Black Cherry Wine may be made in the same manner, excepting the addition of spice, and that the sugar should be finer. If kept in an open vessel four days, these wines will ferment of themselves; but it is better to forward the process by the use of a little yeast, as in former recipes. They will be fit for use in about eight months. As there is a flatness belonging to both these wines if bottled, a teaspoonful of rice, a lump or two of sugar, or four or five raisins will tend to enliven it.
Old-Time Recipes for Home Made Wines is a cookbook for those who want to make their own wines & liqueurs from available ingredients, including fruits, flowers, vegetables, & shrubs from local gardens, farms, & orchards. It includes ingredients & instructions for making & fermenting spirits, from wine & ale to sherry, brandy, cordials, & even beer.
Colonial Era Cookbooks
1615, New Booke of Cookerie, John Murrell (London)
1798, American Cookery, Amelia Simmons (Hartford, CT)
1803, Frugal Housewife, Susannah Carter (New York, NY)
1807, A New System of Domestic Cookery, Maria Eliza Rundell (Boston, MA)
1808, New England Cookery, Lucy Emerson (Montpelier, VT)
Helpful Secondary Sources
America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking/Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Colonial Kitchens, Their Furnishings, and Their Gardens/Frances Phipps Hawthorn; 1972
Early American Beverages/John Hull Brown Rutland, Vt., C. E. Tuttle Co 1996
Early American Herb Recipes/Alice Cooke Brown ABC-CLIO Westport, United States
Food in Colonial and Federal America/Sandra L. Oliver
Home Life in Colonial Days/Alice Morse Earle (Chapter VII: Meat and Drink) New York : Macmillan Co., ©1926.
A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America/James E. McWilliams New York : Columbia University Press, 2005.
