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Blackberry Brandy
Mix equal parts of fruit juice and brandy, for each gallon allowing one pound loaf sugar,
This is a cordial formula rather than a set of instructions — the book assumes you already know how to press berries and cork a bottle. Everything hinges on the ratio: equal parts juice and brandy, with one pound of sugar to the gallon of finished liquid.
- Getting the juiceCrush ripe blackberries, let them stand a few hours to slacken, then strain through a jelly bag without forcing the pulp, which clouds the result. The book gives no yield; expect to need a fair quantity of berries for each pint of juice.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a hard cone and broken off as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct substitute, by weight.
- A gallon means the mixture'For each gallon' most likely refers to the combined juice and brandy, though the text does not say so outright. On that reading, a manageable batch is 2 cups juice, 2 cups brandy and 4 oz sugar.
- Dissolve coldThe recipe gives no method; stirring the sugar into the juice and letting it dissolve without heat is the usual approach for a fresh-fruit cordial.
- What brandy to useThe book does not specify; a plain 80-proof grape brandy is a reasonable modern choice. Diluted with an equal volume of juice that gives roughly 20 percent alcohol, high enough that the cordial should keep well.
- Bottle and waitCork in clean glass and give it time to mellow; the recipe sets no period. Strain again if any sediment forms.
- ServingThis is a sipping cordial in small glasses, not a mixer. The recipe as scaled above makes about a quart.
Blackberry brandy and blackberry cordial were fixtures of the nineteenth-century American household medicine shelf as much as the sideboard. Blackberry root and fruit were long held to be astringent, and the spirit was dosed for what the period called summer complaint or bowel trouble — a use repeated again and again in domestic manuals. Its appearance in a fruit book alongside jams and jellies reflects the same logic that governed all of them: blackberries ripen in a rush, they will not keep a week, and sugar and alcohol were the two reliable ways of holding the season over. Recipes this terse were normal in such collections, written for cooks who had watched the process done and needed only the proportions.