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Water, Cherry
Take a dozen Morella cherries, crush the fruit, and break the kernels; put them into a large tumbler, and pour over them a wine-glassful of capillaire. Half fill the tumbler with shaved ice, add a wine-glassful of cold water, and serve with sponge biscuits.
A Victorian iced fruit drink whose method is trivial and whose central instruction is the problem: the cherry kernels are deliberately broken into the glass. The notes below explain the terms and the hazard, in that order.
- Why the kernels are the issueCherry stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. Crushing a dozen kernels into a cold drink and swallowing the liquid soon after is the set of conditions that liberates it, with no heat step involved. The quantity is unmeasured and varies with the size and variety of the fruit, which is why this cannot be scaled sensibly. If you want an iced cherry drink, use a current recipe that keeps the stones out.
- Morella cherriesAn older spelling of morello, the dark sour cherry used across nineteenth-century English cookery for brandy cherries, tarts and cordials. Fresh morellos are seasonal and sharply acid; supermarket sweet cherries are not the same fruit.
- CapillaireA sweet syrup associated with maidenhair fern, heavily sugared and commonly scented with orange-flower water; by the nineteenth century the fern was often nominal or absent. It had largely fallen out of British domestic use by the early twentieth century. Its role here is sugar plus a faint floral note, nothing more.
- Wine-glassfulIn Victorian recipe books this is conventionally taken as about 2 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup, though the equivalence varied between books; it is not the capacity of a modern wine glass.
- Shaved iceThe tumbler is half filled with ice and only a wine-glassful of water added, so the drink would have thinned as the ice melted. In this period ice was generally a delivered commodity, shaved from a block rather than made in the kitchen.
- Sponge biscuitsDry, finger-shaped sponge fingers of the savoiardi type, served alongside to be dipped. Any plain ladyfinger stands in.
- YieldOne large tumbler, so one serving.
Cassell's places this among a family of "waters" — barley water, lemon water, currant water — the cold, lightly sweetened drinks a Victorian household made at home before bottled soft drinks existed. Capillaire syrup, its distinctive sweetener, was a survival from eighteenth-century confectionery and pharmacy, where maidenhair fern was valued as a demulcent for coughs and drifted from the apothecary's shelf into punches and iced drinks; by the time this dictionary was compiled it was already an old-fashioned ingredient. The deliberate cracking of the kernels reflects a genuine period preference rather than carelessness: the almond-like note of crushed cherry and peach stones was prized in ratafias, noyau and macaroons, and cooks used it freely long before the chemistry of amygdalin was widely understood in domestic kitchens.