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Cherries, Morella, Brandied
The fruit should be freshly gathered, and the largest and best selected. Let each cherry have about an inch of stem left on. Put them into quart bottles with wide necks, and pour four ounces of pounded candy-sugar (the brown is the best) into each bottle. Pour in sufficient best French brandy to fill the bottles, and add a few cherry or apricot kernels, or a small portion of cinnamon, if liked. Time, to infuse, one month. Probable cost, 4s. to 6s. per bottle.
A straightforward alcohol preserve: whole sour cherries steeped in brandy with rock sugar. Almost nothing here needs updating except the units, the sugar and the optional kernels.
- Leave out the kernelsConsider leaving out the kernels — cherry and apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which can break down to release hydrogen cyanide. The quantity here is small and how much passes into the spirit over a month is not well established, but if you would rather not bother with it, take the cinnamon option, or a single strip of lemon peel.
- Morellos, and what to use insteadThe Morello is a dark, acid cooking cherry, not a sweet dessert type. Any sour cherry (Montmorency, Amarelle, or frozen sour cherries thawed and drained) works; a sweet Bing will make the jar cloying, since the sugar is fixed at 4 oz.
- The stemThe inch of stem is probably functional rather than merely decorative: an intact stem end means no torn skin, so the cherry is more likely to hold its shape and the brandy to stay clear rather than muddy with pulp.
- Candy-sugarPounded candy-sugar is rock candy — large crystals grown from syrup. Brown rock sugar (sold as Chinese or demerara rock sugar) is the closest thing; failing that, use demerara. Four ounces is roughly 115 g per bottle.
- Quart bottlesThis is an imperial quart, 40 imperial fl oz or about 1.14 litres, not the US 32 oz quart — so a 1-litre wide-mouth preserving jar is a little smaller than the original bottle. Expect roughly 1.5 lb of cherries plus 500-600 ml of brandy.
- The brandy"Best French brandy" meant a good French spirit — cognac or similar; period strengths varied and were often higher than today's. Use something at 40% ABV or above: the alcohol is the preservative here, and a diluted spirit with fruit sitting in it for months is a different and less stable proposition.
- TimingOne month is the minimum for the sugar to dissolve and the fruit to take the spirit. Three to six months is better, and the cherries hold for a year or more in a cool dark cupboard. Invert the jar every few days for the first fortnight to move the sugar around.
- Cost and yieldThe 4s. to 6s. per bottle is the book's own estimate of what the preserve would cost to make, and tells you only that this was a luxury item. The flavoured brandy left behind is the better half of the result — serve it as a cordial or over ice.
Brandied fruit belongs to the long tradition of preserving in spirit rather than sugar syrup, which reached English households through French and German practice and stayed expensive enough to be a genteel accomplishment rather than everyday thrift. The Morello, a sour Prunus cerasus dark enough to stain, was among the cherries commonly used in English gardens for cooking and bottling — too sharp to eat raw, ideal steeped. The optional kernels point to noyau, the almond-scented liqueur flavoured with stone-fruit kernels, then fashionable in France and imitated at home; nineteenth-century cooks used stone-fruit kernels as a routine substitute for bitter almond flavouring. Cassell's compilers, writing for the mid-to-late Victorian middle-class kitchen, quote a shilling price per bottle as a matter of course, a reminder that these books were as much household budgeting manuals as they were cookbooks.