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Whiskey Cordial
This cordial should be made when white currants are in season. Take the thin rind of a large fresh lemon entirely free from the white bitter part. Put it into a jar with half a pint of ripe white currants stripped from the stalks and a piece of whole ginger the size of a bean. Pour over the ingredients a quart of whiskey, and let them infuse for twenty-four hours. Strain the liquor, sweeten with half a pound of loaf sugar, let it stand twelve hours longer, and bottle for use. Cork securely. Time, two days.
An infusion rather than a distillation: whiskey already made is flavoured with fruit, citrus and spice, then sweetened. Almost nothing about the method needs updating, but the measures and materials do.
- The quart of whiskeyCassell's is a British book, so the quart is presumably an imperial one, 40 fl oz or about 1.1 litres, a little more than two 50 cl bottles. A US quart of 32 fl oz gives a more strongly flavoured, sweeter cordial; either works, but the sugar ratio shifts.
- Half a pint of currantsMeasured by volume, not weight: an imperial half-pint is about 285 ml, so roughly 1 1/4 cups, in the region of 5 oz / 150 g of stripped white currants. White currants are the pale, less acidic form of the redcurrant and turn up mainly at farmers' markets and in gardens; redcurrants substitute at the cost of colour.
- Loaf sugarNineteenth-century loaf sugar was hard refined cane sugar broken from a cone, prized because it was clean and free of molasses. Ordinary granulated sugar is its direct descendant; half a pound is 225 g, a little over a cup.
- The lemon rind is the hinge"Entirely free from the white bitter part" is the instruction that decides whether the cordial is fragrant or harsh. Pare with a vegetable peeler in wide, thin strips and stop before you see white pith; twenty-four hours is long enough for the oils and long enough for pith to spoil the batch.
- Whole ginger the size of a bean'whole' ginger in this period usually meant dried whole root rather than ground; a piece perhaps 1 cm across. Fresh ginger will dominate in a day, so use less if that is all you have.
- Infuse cool and coveredTwenty-four hours at room temperature in a sealed jar, out of direct light. Longer maceration tends to draw harsher, more bitter notes from the peel.
- Straining and the twelve-hour restStrain through a fine sieve, then again through muslin if you want it bright; do not press the fruit, which pushes pulp through and clouds the bottle. The second rest simply lets the sugar dissolve fully and the last haze settle before bottling.
- Yield and keepingAbout a quart of finished cordial, or five to six half-pint bottles. Sealed and corked, the alcohol and sugar will keep it for years, though the fresh currant note fades after six months or so.
Household cordials of this kind sit at the point where the still-room met the drinks cupboard. Before commercial liqueurs were cheap and widely sold, an English or Irish kitchen would often buy plain spirit and flavour it at home, and Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery carries a long run of such recipes, apparently because they were considered part of a cook's ordinary work rather than a specialist's. The insistence that the cordial "should be made when white currants are in season" is the tell: currants ripen in high summer and do not travel or keep, so the sugar and spirit are the means of holding the flavour beyond the season. Whiskey rather than brandy suggests an Irish or Scottish inflection; the whole ginger and pared lemon peel are the standard nineteenth-century still-room seasonings, inherited more or less unchanged from the spiced medicinal waters of far earlier household books.