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Gooseberry Liqueur
Braise five quarts of ripe gooseberries, blanch and cut up a quarter of a pound of bitter and a quarter of a pound of sweet almonds, bruise half a tea-spoonful of cinnamon and the same of mace, and add to the gooseberries. Dissolve six pounds of lump sugar in two gallons of gin, whisky, or brandy; stir all together, and leave for two or three months; then strain and bottle. It may be drunk in a month's time, but improves by keeping.
This is a cold-infusion cordial, and the problem is not the technique but one of the ingredients: a quarter of a pound of bitter almonds steeped in spirit and drunk without any heating or distillation.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stop hereBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the enzyme emulsin converts to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed and wetted. A quarter of a pound is roughly 110 g of kernels, steeping in liquid that is then strained off and drunk.
- Nothing in the method removes the hazardCommercial almond flavourings are treated to remove prussic acid before sale. Here the almonds are blanched, cut up and left in the spirit for months, and the whole infusion is strained and bottled. The toxic fraction stays in the bottle.
- You will not find them anywaySale of bitter almonds for eating is restricted or prohibited in the United States and much of Europe. What is sold as "bitter almond" today is normally a flavouring extract, not the kernel, and the two are not interchangeable in a recipe written to this scale.
- Substitution is not a fixSwapping in sweet almonds gives a different drink altogether. If you want a gooseberry cordial, use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- On the wording"Braise" in the first line is almost certainly a compositor's error for "bruise": the fruit is crushed, not cooked. "Lump sugar" is refined loaf sugar broken into pieces, equivalent to ordinary granulated.
Fruit liqueurs made by steeping rather than distilling were a staple of the English still-room, a way of turning a glut of soft fruit into something that kept through the winter; gooseberries, which ripen in enormous quantity in July and bruise easily, were an obvious candidate. The almond note was deliberate — bitter almonds, peach kernels and cherry stones were all used to give cordials the marzipan-and-stone-fruit flavour that Victorian palates associated with ratafia, and the kernels were sold freely by grocers and druggists. Recipes like this one persisted in print well after chemists had identified amygdalin in 1830, the work of Robiquet and Boutron-Charlard. The two-gallon scale is a reminder that this was a domestic economy of barrels and stone jars, not of the single bottle.