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Blackberry Cordial
Crush the berries with a pestle, turn into a bag, and with the pestle and a spoon press out all the juice possible. Let stand an hour of more to "settle," then turn into a bag and let drip through it. For each quart of juice, take two cups of sugar, a teaspoonful, each, of ground cloves and cinnamon, and half a nutmeg, grated; let boil gently twenty minutes, store in bottles when cold, adding to each quart about one fourth of a cup of French brandy.
Preserved Cherries and Delaware Cherry Vinegar Stone the cherries and cover with vinegar.
Let this stand on the cherries over night in a cool place. Next day drain off the vinegar and cherry juice and keep for a beverage. It is cherry vinegar or cherry "shrub," when sugar is added to it. Delaware cherry vinegar is as much esteemed as raspberry vinegar. This is, however, a by-product, the main thing being the fruit itself.
After draining off the vinegar, put the cherries in a stone crock with alternate layers of white sugar, allowing three quarters of a pound of sugar for every pint of cherries. Keep the crock covered and in a cool place. Stir it gently so as not to cut up the fruit, every day for ten days.
A wooden spatula, or spoon, is a good thing to use for this. The fruit may then be put into smaller receptacles, but need not be sealed airtight. The result is pronounced delicious.
Two separate preparations have been run together on this page: a spiced blackberry cordial, and a cold sugar cure for cherries that throws off a fruit vinegar as a by-product. Both are simple, but neither is a shelf-stable canned good by modern standards.
- The bagBoth bag steps mean a jelly bag or several layers of scalded cheesecloth. The first pressing gives cloudy juice; the second, undisturbed drip is what keeps the finished cordial clear. Squeezing the second bag defeats the point.
- How many berriesNo yield is given, and none can be derived from the text. Very roughly, something in the region of 3 lb of ripe blackberries may give a quart of strained juice, but yields vary with ripeness and pressing, so measure the juice and spice by the quart as the recipe directs.
- SpicingA teaspoon each of ground cloves and cinnamon per quart is assertive by current taste, and half a grated nutmeg is close to a whole teaspoon. Grating whole nutmeg and cracking whole cloves into the pot, then straining, gives a cleaner result than pre-ground spice boiled for twenty minutes.
- The twenty-minute boilThis is a gentle reduction, not a jelly set. Watch for a syrup that coats a spoon lightly; longer than twenty minutes at a hard boil and the fruit character cooks away.
- Brandy is flavouring, not preservationA quarter cup of brandy in a quart works out to about two per cent alcohol in the finished bottle, far too little to preserve anything. With only two cups of sugar per quart, the sugar is not doing it either. Treat the cordial as a refrigerator syrup and use it within a few weeks, or freeze it in portions.
- BottlingBottle only once fully cold, into scalded bottles, and leave headspace. If the corks push out or the liquid begins to fizz, it has started to ferment and should be discarded.
- The cherry cureThree quarters of a pound of sugar per pint of stoned cherries is about 1 3/4 cups sugar to 2 cups fruit. The overnight vinegar soak acidifies the surface of the fruit, and the sugar draws out water over the ten days of daily stirring; nothing is cooked at any point. Keep the crock refrigerated rather than merely "in a cool place," and discard the batch at the first sign of mould or yeasty foam.
- Cherry shrubThe drained vinegar and cherry juice is the shrub base. Sweeten to taste, roughly equal parts sugar to liquid dissolved cold, and keep it in the refrigerator; it is meant to be diluted with still or sparkling water.
Fruit shrubs, from the Arabic sharab, meaning a drink, reached English and American households as a way of holding summer fruit in vinegar and sugar long before reliable home canning, and they survived into the twentieth century as a hot-weather beverage poured over ice. Cordials followed a parallel line: spiced, sweetened fruit juice with a little spirit added, drunk in small glasses and long kept in the domestic medicine cupboard as much as the pantry, blackberry in particular having a durable folk reputation as a remedy for summer stomach complaints. The "Delaware" cherry named here goes unexplained on the page, the sort of local name that filled American cookbooks of the period and rarely outlived them. That the writer treats the vinegar as a by-product and the sugared fruit as "the main thing" is characteristic of a preserving book from the era.