Home › The Cherry › Cherry Brandy
Cherry Brandy
To each quart of juice resulting from crushed cherries (uncooked) allow a gallon of spirits or brandy, add the pits, crushed, let stand three weeks and strain.
This is an infusion rather than a distillation, but the crushed pits put it outside what can responsibly be made today. The notes below explain the chemistry and the other oddities in the instruction.
- The crushed pits are the problemCherry kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. Crushing the pit ruptures the kernel and brings the amygdalin into contact with the enzyme emulsin, which can liberate hydrogen cyanide; how much actually forms in a high-proof steep is unpredictable, since alcohol inhibits the enzyme. Whole, uncracked pits contribute almost nothing; deliberately crushed ones are the reason this direction should not be followed.
- No quantity is givenThe recipe says only "add the pits, crushed": the pits from whatever weight of cherries yielded a quart of juice, steeped for three weeks with no filtration beyond a final strain. The juice-to-spirit proportion is given, but the quantity of kernel is not, so there is no way to estimate the cyanide load in the finished bottle and no way for a home cook to test it. That indeterminacy is as much the hazard as the chemistry.
- Why it was done at allThe kernel supplies the bitter-almond note that older palates expected in cherry liqueurs — the flavour sold commercially as noyau or ratafia. Modern producers get it from measured, controlled kernel extracts or from benzaldehyde, precisely because uncontrolled kernel steeping is not predictable.
- Archaic proportionsA quart of juice to a gallon of spirits is four parts alcohol to one part fruit, and no sugar is called for anywhere. The result would have been harsh and thin by modern liqueur standards; many period cherry brandy and bounce recipes do call for sugar, which this entry simply omits.
- "Spirits" in this periodThe word covered anything from near-neutral grain spirit to rough domestic whiskey, at strengths that were not standardised as they are now. It is not interchangeable with the brandy on a present-day shelf, so even the alcohol side of the ratio does not translate directly.
- If you want cherry brandyUse a current recipe that steeps whole, unbroken cherries and discards the pits. Do not attempt to adapt the timing or quantities above.
Cherry brandy in English and American household books sits between two older traditions: cherry bounce, a colonial spirit-and-fruit steep that turns up in eighteenth-century Virginia and Pennsylvania receipt books, and the European ratafia or noyau, in which stone-fruit kernels supplied a bitter-almond perfume. Cookery writers well into the twentieth century treated a few cracked pits as an ordinary flavouring for jams, custards and cordials, the toxicity being understood only loosely if at all. The direction is printed in a single line because it assumed the reader already knew the technique; what it did not assume is the amygdalin chemistry that makes the direction one not to repeat now.