HERB - long pepper

Beth Ann Snead ladypeyton at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 20 11:12:41 PDT 1998


---"N.D. Wederstrandt" <nweders at mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
>
>  Could you post the cordial recipe????
> Please, please please
> 
> Clare

Wine for Memory

source: Boke of Wine - Arnald de Villanova translated 1948 from the
German version printed in 1437

"A wine that brings back the memory and which is good for
forgetfulness.  make it thus:  Take ginger, long pepper, and galingale
two ounces of each; cloves cubebs one half ounce of each; Indian nut
[I redacted this as nutmeg] one ounce and one and a half drachms. 
make a powder of all this, bind it carefully into a little bag and put
it in seven pounds of good fermenting wine.  Cover it well, so that it
does not lose its flavor, and let it clarify.  Use it whenever you
need it and do not remove the little bag.  It is also good for warming
cold people and for drying moist people.  It helps also against all
flatulence of evil moisture." 

My redaction was (without a source for long pepper):

1 gallons of Beaujolais that I was making that was not completely
finished fermenting.  (my bathroom scale told me that 1 gallon was @14
pounds) 

4 ounces each of ginger, galingale and a half and half mixture of
black peppercorns and grains of paradise to roughly equate the taste
of long pepper (which I had ascertained through research not through
experience.)

1 ounce each of cloves and cubeb

2 1/2 ounces of Indian nut which I had decided must have been nutmeg
which had been described in my sources as "a spice that Indians and
Arabs valued as a treatment for digestive, liver and skin complaints"
and that was "valuable both as a medicine and a spice." 

I roughly ground the spices together in a mortar, bound them in
cheesecloth and dropped the cloth into a gallon carboy of wine that
was sealed with an airlock.  When the fermentation was finished and
the wine had clarified (cleared to the point that you can see the
concise outline of a candle flame through the bottle) I racked it off
the lees took the bag out and bottled the wine.  I took the bag out of
the wine because the modern bottling procedure will forestall any
fading of the flavor of the spices until it is opened.

WARNING - this cordial (it was used sometimes as a digestive and
therefore is a cordial) tastes like medicine.  I am hoping the use of
long pepper instead of my replacement will improve the outcome but I
don't ever think this recipe will result in something to pass around
the campfire.  
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