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Raspberry Whiskey
Take nine quarts of ripe red raspberries, and pick them nicely; boil them twenty minutes with four pounds and a half of the best loaf sugar, skimming frequently; strain the liquor through a fine sieve, and mix it with a gallon of genuine old whiskey and a quarter of a pint of strained lemon-juice. Pour it into a clean stone jar upon one ounce of cloves, a quarter of an ounce of cinnamon, two nutmegs sliced, and two ounces of sugar-candy broken small. Stir these ingredients well together, put in the bung, and seal the jar. Let the vessel stand six months in a dry, warm cellar, then strain the liquor, and filter it through fine flannel till it is perfectly clear and bright. Bottle it, seal the corks, and keep it for twelve months longer that the sweet taste may be lost; it will then be beautifully rich.
A steeped fruit cordial rather than anything distilled, and the only real difficulty is patience: the original expects eighteen months from picking to pouring.
- Quantities in modern termsNine quarts of raspberries is roughly 11-12 lb. Four and a half pounds of sugar to that fruit gives a heavy syrup, and if this is an English book a gallon means the imperial gallon, about 1.2 US gallons (4.5 litres).
- A quarter of a pintIn an English kitchen that is 5 fl oz, roughly the juice of four or five lemons. Strain it properly; pulp is what clouds the finished bottle.
- Loaf sugar and sugar-candyLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone, for which granulated sugar is the nearest modern substitute. Sugar-candy is rock candy; it can be omitted with no real loss.
- The spicing is aggressiveAn ounce of cloves, a quarter-ounce of cinnamon and two whole nutmegs to six or seven quarts of liquid will dominate everything after six months. Half or a third of the spice gives a cordial where the raspberry is still identifiable.
- VesselA glazed stone jar with a bung is a large glass demijohn or several 2-quart preserving jars today. Whatever you use should be glass or food-grade stoneware, filled nearly full, and closed tight; avoid plastic and bare reactive metal.
- \Read that as cool, dark and stable rather than warm. Modern cellars run 55-65F, which is what you want. Warmth and light are what turn a red fruit cordial brown.
- FilteringFine flannel does the job, but a rinsed jelly bag followed by a paper coffee filter is faster.
Cassell's puts this among the cordials and "home-made liqueurs" that a well-run Victorian household made in fruit season and drank two years later, a habit descended from the older English ratafias and shrubs. The method is infusion, not distilling: sugar and spirit preserve the fruit, and the long rest is there to let the sweetness fall back and the whiskey and raspberry come together, which is apparently what the recipe means by keeping it "that the sweet taste may be lost." Whiskey rather than brandy is worth noting, since brandy is generally taken to have been the usual base for English fruit cordials; whiskey cordials of this kind are more often associated with Scottish and Irish practice, and with American household books, where cheap domestic spirit was the thing to hand. The insistence on "genuine old whiskey" may be read as a period concern about the quality of the spirit to be had, though the phrase itself is all the recipe gives us.