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Angelica Ratafia
A very rich, fine cordial, made by putting half a pound of the shoots of the above plant into two quarts of brandy, with a pint of water, two pounds of sugar, a few cloves, and a little cinnamon. The angelica must infuse for two months in a close vessel before it is strained and bottled. Probable cost, per pint, 3d., exclusive of the brandy.
A steeped cordial rather than anything cooked, so the only real variables are proportions, vessel and patience. A few of them need adjusting.
- The plant"The above plant" is garden angelica, Angelica archangelica — the tender green stems and leaf stalks of the first or second year's growth, cut in late spring. Buy from a herb nursery rather than foraging: several deadly umbellifers, water hemlock and hemlock water dropwort among them, grow in the damp ground angelica favours and have been mistaken for it.
- VolumesCassell's quarts and pints are imperial: two quarts is about 2.3 litres (roughly 9.5 US cups) and the pint of water about 570 ml. Scaling down by quarters works cleanly if you do not want three-quarters of a gallon of cordial.
- Brandy strengthWith the pint of water and two pounds of sugar added, a 40% ABV brandy finishes somewhere near 25% — sweet, but low enough that the syrup should be kept cool and used within a year or so.
- SugarTwo pounds (900 g) in this volume gives a frankly heavy liqueur. Some modern liqueur recipes infuse the spirit with the angelica alone and stir in sugar syrup at the straining stage, which lets you stop at the sweetness you want and keeps the sugar from slowing extraction.
- The spices"A few cloves" over two months is a great deal of clove. Two or three whole cloves and a 2 cm piece of cinnamon bark are plenty for the full quantity; taste at three or four weeks and lift the spices out once they assert themselves, leaving the angelica to carry on.
- A close vesselA wide-mouthed glass jar with a tight lid, filled nearly to the top and kept in the dark at room temperature. Shake it every few days. Sunlight will strip the colour and flatten the aroma over eight weeks.
- Straining and yieldStrain through muslin, then leave the liquid to settle a day and rack it off the sediment for a clear bottle. The full recipe makes something over three litres, six or seven 500 ml bottles; it improves for several months after bottling.
- One caveat on angelicaThe plant contains furocoumarins, which can make skin unusually sensitive to sunlight. Handling large quantities of fresh stems in bright weather is the risk, not drinking the finished cordial in normal amounts.
Ratafia was the general European term for a cordial made by steeping fruit, kernels or herbs in spirit and sweetening the result — the name is often traced to the Latin rata fiat of a toast drunk to seal a bargain, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled, and it may have reached French through the Caribbean. Angelica had long been the aromatic backbone of monastic liqueurs, most famously Chartreuse, and its candied green stems were a specialty of Niort in western France, where the plant was grown in quantity along the marshes. That a middle-class English household manual of the later nineteenth century should carry the recipe says something about the period's home cordial-making: brandy was the expensive part, as Cassell's costing frankly admits by quoting threepence a pint "exclusive of the brandy", and the two-month infusion belonged to a kitchen where a jar could simply be put on a shelf and forgotten until it was ready.