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Ratafia, Quince
Grate ripe quinces till you come to the core, but be careful that there are no pips; let the mass remain for three days in an earthen pan; squeeze it to extract all the juice, measure this and add to it an equal quantity of brandy; allow six ounces of sugar to each quart of the mixture, with some cinnamon and cloves to taste: let it infuse for two months, then filter it, and pour it into bottles. This liqueur when old is excellent.
A cold-infusion liqueur, not a cordial to be cooked: nothing is heated at any point, and the brandy does all the preserving. The main demands are patience and a genuinely ripe quince.
- Keep the pips outQuince seeds, like apple pips and cherry kernels, contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic compound, and they are bitter and highly mucilaginous, which is reason enough to keep them out of a two-month infusion. Grate down to the core and stop; discard the core whole.
- UnitsA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 fl oz or about 1.14 litres; 6 oz of sugar is about 170 g, so roughly 150 g of sugar per litre of finished liqueur. That is a lightly sweetened liqueur by modern standards, closer to a fortified fruit wine than a syrupy cordial.
- The three-day restGrated quince pulp left in an earthenware pan softens and begins to ferment slightly, which loosens the juice and takes the raw astringency off it. Cover it, keep it cool rather than warm, and if it smells sour or shows mould rather than a faint winey tang, start again.
- Getting the juice outQuince flesh is dense and gives up its juice grudgingly. Squeeze the pulp through a jelly bag or a doubled square of muslin, twisting hard; expect well under half the weight of fruit as juice, so several pounds of quinces are needed for even a modest quantity of liqueur.
- BrandyEqual parts juice and brandy puts the finished liqueur near 18-20% alcohol, which is enough to keep it. Use a plain, unaged grape brandy rather than an oaked cognac; the barrel character fights the quince.
- Spices"To taste" over two months means restraint: a single small cinnamon stick and three or four cloves per litre is ample, and cloves in particular will take over if given the chance. Taste at a month and strain the spices out early if they have gone far enough.
- Filtering and keepingQuince infusions throw a persistent haze of pectin. Let the jar stand undisturbed, siphon off the clear liquid, then pass it through a coffee filter or several thicknesses of muslin. Bottle full to the neck, cork tightly, and keep it dark. The note that it is excellent when old is accurate; a year in the bottle rounds the astringency.
Ratafia was the general eighteenth- and nineteenth-century term for a domestic liqueur made by steeping fruit, kernels or spices in brandy and sweetening the result, and it appears in English household books in dozens of versions: cherry, blackcurrant, apricot, walnut, and the almond-scented sort that gave its name to ratafia biscuits. The name is often traced to the Latin rata fiat, a phrase from ratifying an agreement, on the grounds that such a drink was served to seal a bargain, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Quince was a natural candidate because the fruit is too hard and astringent to eat raw and was already a fixture of the still-room in the form of marmalade, cheese and jelly. A liqueur like this belonged to the household's own production rather than the shops: it is a method to be applied to whatever fruit the garden gave up, and quince gave up a great deal in October.