What drinkables are and how they are preserved.

The preservation of drinkables must also be considered: by these we mean wine, beer, mead, vinegar and milk. To preserve these five without damage and in their virtue, their greatest enemy must be well known. It is none other than impure women during the flow of menstruation: if they press these things, move around them, look at them or touch them with their breath, they corrupt them. Wine changes and becomes ropy, beer and mead turn sour, vinegar weakens and loses its sharpness, and milk too sours and coagulates.

Menstruating women are enemies of drinkables.

Wine is preserved with sulphur and so forth.

This must therefore be well understood before speaking specifically of each one’s preservation. The greatest preservative and safeguard of wine is sulphur and oil of sulphur, by which every wine can be kept a very long time without becoming ropy or otherwise changing.

Beer is preserved with oil of cloves.

Beer’s preservative is oil of cloves, if a few drops are added, so that one measure contains three or two drops. Better still is oil of blessed avens, which preserves beer from sourness. Mead’s preservative is oil of sugar, to be used like oil of cloves or of avens.

Mead is preserved with oil of sugar.

By what means vinegar and milk are preserved.

Vinegar’s preservative is oil of ginger; milk’s preservative is expressed oil of almonds. These two must be used as described.

Cheeses are preserved with hypericum and so forth.

The preservative of cheeses is the plant hypericon or perforata, which defends and guards all cheeses from worms. If placed beside a cheese and touching it, no worm is born in it; if any have already been born and live there, they all die and fall out of the cheese.