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Cherry Bounce or Wild Cherry Rum
On four pounds of wild cherries, mashed with the pits broken and bruised, pour five quarts of rum. Let stand in stone jar or crock two weeks, stirring daily. Then press the fruit well, add five and one-fourth quarts of water in which have been dissolved two and one-half pounds of sugar. Filter and bottle.
CHERRY VINEGAR (For Flavouring Salads, Etc.) Stem and crush Morella cherries, allowing for each quart of cherries two quarts of vinegar. Let stand four weeks, when strain and bottle.
Two recipes are run together here. The cherry bounce cannot be made as written: it depends on deliberately breaking and bruising the pits of wild cherries, which is the one step in the whole procedure that must not be done.
- Why the crushed pits are the problemWild cherry stones (Prunus serotina, P. virginiana and relatives) contain the cyanogenic glycoside amygdalin. Intact pits are largely inert because the glycoside and the enzyme that splits it stay separated; mashing and bruising them puts the two together in a wet mash and liberates hydrogen cyanide.
- Quantity and contact time are both out of rangeFour pounds of wild cherries is many hundreds if not thousands of small stones, all crushed, held in five quarts of spirit for two weeks with daily stirring. An alcohol-water mixture will extract the glycoside from the crushed kernels, and nothing in the process — no heat, no distillation, only filtering — removes what has been extracted. There is no way to know the dose in the finished bottle.
- Not the same as commercial pit liqueursModern stone-fruit liqueurs and noyau flavourings are made under controlled conditions with measured material and tested for hydrocyanic acid. A crock on a pantry shelf offers none of that. If you want a cherry cordial, use a current tested recipe.
- "Morella" cherriesIn the vinegar recipe this is the Morello, the dark sour cooking cherry (Griottes in French markets). Sour cherries, not sweet Bings, are what the flavour depends on.
- The vinegar's strengthTwo quarts of vinegar per quart of crushed fruit means the juice dilutes the acid considerably; keeping the acidity high is what makes a four-week room-temperature infusion safe to leave standing. Use standard 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar, not a low-acid artisanal bottling.
- Stone jar or crockGlazed stoneware or glass only. Vinegar and long fruit steeping will attack unglazed earthenware, aluminium and reactive metal lids.
- "Filter"Period usage means straining through several thicknesses of flannel or a coarse paper cone until the liquid runs clear, not fine mechanical filtration. Expect it to be slow and to need more than one pass.
Cherry bounce was a farmhouse cordial of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made wherever wild cherries grew thickly along fence rows — the name is usually traced to the drink's kick rather than to any bouncing of the jar, though the derivation is not settled. A number of older books called for breaking the stones, apparently on the belief that they added the bitter-almond note found in noyau and ratafia; that flavour and the cyanide come from the same compound, which is why the practice is now discouraged. Wild cherry also had a second life in the same period as a medicine: wild cherry bark syrup was a common cough preparation, and a spirit steeped on cherries sat comfortably in the space between the pantry and the medicine chest. The vinegar that follows belongs to a different and more durable tradition, the fruit vinegars used for salads and for shrubs, which returned to fashion in the late twentieth century.<br><br>Note: the vinegar recipe here is sound in principle; the cherry bounce above it is not.