Slow gin, yes; elderberry wine, yes; wine, indeed from other fruit and once read of, or heard of a liquor taken from the sap of birch trees. Quince liqueur - marvellous. But rum from a marrow? Never. Yet there it is in a recent (October) issue of The Countryman. It is, we are told, "in all the old books" but the writer, Evelyn Nash, at first anyway, believed that it may be a rural myth.
She quotes, the instructions "Take a large, ripe marrow, cut off the top, scoop out the seeds and pith and fill the cavity with brown sugar and creamed yeast. Replace top, taping it in position. Hang marrow in a muslin bag in a warm place. Leave it for a month or so, then cut a hole in the base of the marrow and let the contents drain into a container. The first time the writer tried it, she put it in a cupboard under the stairs and once accidentally knocked it over after a while. There was, she writes, a squelchy noise and a horrid smell. It had gone bad. She cleared up the goo.
The next year she had more success. The marrow remained firm and she eventually cut a hole in the bottom to let the precious liquid duly drip through. It was bottled - a rather meagre amount, she thought, and not opened until Easter. Horrible, nauseous, revolting were some of the adjectives used. They tried it on a friend who was said to drink anything. He took one swig and added an adjective not to be found in Roget's Thesaurus. A man whose mother, according to him, made wine out of materials including the curled fronds of bracken, agreed that it was horrible. One C. J. Berry, apparently an expert on such wines and drinks states, firmly, she adds, that it isn't worth making. Still the writer asks readers for other opinions.
So, in the December issue of the same magazine, one Sally Jacobs from Orpington remembered her own efforts with marrow rum. She, too, had difficulty keeping the marrow intact while it was suspended over an old, wide-mouthed sweet jar. "My reward, however, was a very acceptable drink, despite its resemblance to a medical specimen: its taste was deceptively innocuous, and its effect very intoxicating and warming." She adds: "As there was not a lot of it, it was kept for the onset of colds, or the bitter winter days that were more common then."
She had mentioned in her letter that all this was "many years ago". Perhaps memory has given a slightly rosy view to an experience that no one reading this would surely ever want to try. Stick to the sloes, etc.? Incidentally The Countryman had put a heading on her letter "Rum Memories".