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CHERRY BRANDY (another way) (Choose sound fresh Morella)
Choose sound, fresh Morella cherries, wipe them, and cut off the stalks to within half an inch, prick each cherry with a needle, half fill a wide-necked bottle with them, and to each bottle put a dozen scraped bitter almonds and a quarter of a pound of white sugar-candy crushed small. Fill with best French brandy, cork securely, and seal over the top. The brandy will be better if kept for a few months. Probable cost of cherries, 10d. to 1s. per pound.
This is a steeped cordial rather than a cooked dish, and the technique is simple enough. The problem is one ingredient, and it is not a small one.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which breaks down into hydrogen cyanide in the presence of water and the almond's own enzyme. Twelve of them, scraped and left in liquid for months, is a deliberate extraction, not an incidental trace, and alcohol pulls the flavour compounds out efficiently. Sale of bitter almonds for eating is restricted or banned in the United States and controlled elsewhere for exactly this reason.
- No heat step, no protectionIn marzipan and ratafia biscuits the almond flavouring is baked; here nothing is ever heated. Cold maceration over several months gives the reaction all the time it needs, though strong spirit does inhibit the enzyme involved, so the yield is uncertain rather than nil. If you want almond note in a fruit cordial, use a current recipe built around sweet almonds or a commercial extract.
- The pricked cherries matter tooMorello stones also carry amygdalin, and pricking each fruit is what lets the brandy reach the flesh and, over months, the stone. On its own this is the level of exposure found in traditional kirsch and cherry ratafia and is not the headline risk, but it compounds the almonds rather than offsetting them.
- Morella means MorelloThe spelling is Victorian. Morello is the dark, sharp cooking cherry, quite different from a sweet eating cherry, and its acidity is what balances the sugar in a brandied preparation.
- Sugar-candyWhite sugar-candy is crystallised cane sugar sold in lumps, dissolving more slowly than granulated. A quarter of a pound in a bottle already half filled with fruit is a fair amount of sugar relative to the spirit.
- The price noteTen pence to a shilling a pound reflects Cassell's habit of giving a probable cost for most entries, for a housekeeper working to a budget. It tells you nothing about quantities and can be ignored as a measurement.
Brandied cherries belong to a long European tradition of preserving summer fruit in spirit, and the Morello, too sour to eat raw, is often said to have been a favourite for the purpose. The bitter almond addition is the giveaway of period taste: nineteenth-century cooks prized the note we now call marzipan or ratafia, and reached for bitter almonds, peach kernels or cherry stones to get it, all of which are chemically the same trick. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households late in the century, prints several such steeped cordials alongside its cooked preserves, since a wide-necked bottle on a cool shelf asked nothing of the range and produced something that improved for months. The hazard was not unknown at the time -- bitter almond essence figures in Victorian poisoning cases and in the detective fiction that followed them.