[Sca-cooks] Birch Tree recipes was Tree Saps: Was New World Food (wines)

Nick Sasso grizly at mindspring.com
Sun Apr 27 10:16:50 PDT 2008


-----Original Message-----
There is of course a recipe for Birch Wine that starts out by tapping
birch trees
in the Tudor Jacobean manuscript A Booke of Sweetmeats as published
in Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery, edited by Karen Hess.
See recipe S257 To Make Birch Wine.
(It turns up quite frequently and is even mentioned as being a product
of Scotland in Mason and Brown's
Traditional Foods of Britain. They even refer one to a recipe by John
Evelyn.)
I found that
Birch Wine is also mentioned in Vinetum Britannicum;  > > > > > >


Do you have the information handy to describe what other fermentables are
added?  Anyone who has ever heard of "dandelion wine" whould know that
dandelions bring zero to the table in terms of fermentables.  It is only
flavoring.  I am curious to see just how much fermentable sugars are in
Birch sap for the wine making.  Could be quite easy for fermenting as
opposed to making high density syrups. . . as Ranvaig pointed out to us in
his posts.  All you need for a good wine is a specific gravity of somewhere
around 1.1 or 1.2 to get a reasonable wine.  Ale can be done for 1.045 or
less.

niccolo




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