You may have been sceptical about your aunt's home-made elderberry wine, but Mrs Beeton gave pages and pages of her famous book to wines made from the most varied raw materials. You will have heard of cowslip wine and cowslips are not so abundant now. Then she has a clary flower wine. Never heard of clary flowers? They turn out to be the flowers of the sage. Of this concoction she has a note of caution: "As this wine leaves much deposit, the tap for drawing it off should be high in the cask." Something like 50 recipes including, believe it or not, turnip wine. All this because Ian Hill has written from Belfast following a piece on oak-leaf wine mentioned here (a commercial wine, not home-made).
"Much more appetising," he declares, "is the Spanish spirit licor de bellota, distilled from the common acorn. A fair substitute, he maintains, can be made in Ireland - rather in the manner of sloe gin - by filling to the depth of one third an emptied gin (or vodka) bottle with ripe acorns, peeled and broken in half lengthwise. Top up with gin (or vodka) and a tablespoonful of sugar. Secure, keep in a dark place 'till Christmas, rotating weekly. Avellana, widely available in Spain, is made from hazel nuts and can also be replicated in the above manner. The Spanish version of sloe gin, excellent and called pacheran, is widely on sale. The acorn liquor, whether commercially distilled in the Extramadura region of the Iberian peninsula or macerated at home in Co Down (from both pedunculate and sessile oak) "goes particularly well as a digestif before or after one of the simple fish dishes described in my own book The Fish of Ireland (Appletree)."
There we are at last. And he is not averse to giving us the goods on the book, too. It "provides scientific drawings, the scientific name of each fish accompanied by a translation into up to a dozen western European languages, plus details of how to catch and then how to cook your fish." There are, he writes, well over 100 edible species round our coasts and in our lakes and rivers. Two bookshops in Dublin had no copies left, but Easons came up with one. Y