[Sca-cooks] More Cherry wines

[johnna holloway]

 As promised here are more cherry recipes.

Rebecca Price's The Compleat Cook, or the Secrets of
a Seventeenth Century Housewife [ed. by Masson, 1974]
contains recipes for "curant wine with balck cherrys
in it", p.297, two recipes for "red cherry wine", p.299,
and one for "black cherry wine" p, 300. One for "cherry
brandy" is on p. 305. The mss. collection is dated 1681.

As to why there are cherry wine recipes in the 17th century,
I finally located a reference early this am. C. Anne Wilson
in Food and Drink in Britain indicates that these various
home grown fruits were increasingly made into wine as sugar
became cheaper and more available in the 17th century.
Moreover, it should be remembered that cherries are also a short
season fruit, so making cherries into any wine or conserves
takes immediate production of the fresh fruit. They were also
favoured as one of the fresh fruits that were consumed raw.
 I hope this answers more of the questions.

 Johnnae llyn Lewis
 Johnna Holloway

> -------------------------------------------------------------
> All in all though, it looks like cherry wine was not that common
> in period. Any ideas why? Were the cherries not sweet enough? There
> was some mention here of sugar having to be added, which would
> definitely
> be a late or post period thing. Were cherries not common enough that
> there would be enough juice for this? Or maybe simply a matter of taste?
> Although fermented cherry juice has got to be better than fermented
> mare's milk. :-)
>
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> THLord  Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
> Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas         stefan at texas.net
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