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Apricot Ratafia
Cover some sliced apricots with white wine, and simmer them gently until they are reduced to a pulp; then pour them into an earthen jar. Add to them a cupful of brandy, and a quarter of a pound of sugar to each quart of liquid. Put in with them three or four of the kernels of the fruit broken in pieces, with a little mace, cloves, and cinnamon. Let these materials macerate in the ratafia for a fortnight; then strain the liquid, and preserve it in well-closed vessels. Time to simmer the apricots, half an hour.
This is a home cordial built on fruit, wine, brandy, sugar and spice — all unremarkable — plus crushed apricot kernels, which is where it fails. The points below explain the problem rather than resolving it.
- The kernels are the hazardThe seed inside an apricot stone contains amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is broken and comes into contact with moisture and enzymes. Cracking three or four kernels into a quart of liquid and leaving them to macerate for two weeks is precisely the extraction procedure that liberates it.
- No quantity here is measurableApricot kernels vary enormously in amygdalin content between varieties, and "three or four" gives no weight. There is no way to know from this text how much cyanogenic glycoside ends up in the finished bottle, which is why some food authorities now warn against, or restrict the retail sale of, bitter apricot kernels.
- Nothing drives the compound offThe apricots are simmered, but the kernels go in afterwards, cold, into an unheated spirit infusion. Whatever is extracted during the fortnight stays in the strained liquid and is then stored in sealed vessels indefinitely.
- The flavour it was afterThe kernels are there for a marzipan-and-almond note, the same note that bitter almonds and peach stones were used for throughout the period. Any modern ratafia or apricot liqueur recipe achieves it with sweet almond, almond extract or a commercial apricot liqueur; use a current recipe rather than this one.
- Archaic measures, for readingA quart in an English book of this date is 40 fl oz, not the American 32; "cupful" is not a standard English measure and its size is uncertain, though it is often read as roughly half a pint; a quarter of a pound of sugar is 4 oz, about half a cup. An "earthen jar" is an earthenware or stoneware crock, usually glazed; glass now serves the same purpose.
- Ratafia is not distilledNothing here is distilled; the alcohol comes entirely from the wine and the added brandy. That part of the method is ordinary period practice for a fruit cordial.
Ratafia in English cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means a sweetened, spiced infusion of fruit in wine or spirit, drunk in small glasses after dinner; the word is generally traced to French usage, and it was applied loosely to cherry, apricot, quince and blackcurrant versions alike. Many of them called for a few crushed stone kernels, the bitter-almond note being treated as characteristic of the style rather than as a contaminant — the same instinct that put bitter almonds into ratafia biscuits and blancmange. Preparations of this sort sat among household preserving work, alongside fruit syrups and vinegars. The quantity of kernels is given casually here; regulation of their sale came long after the recipe was printed.