Home › The Cherry › Cherry Cordial
Cherry Cordial
To a gallon of strained juice add two pounds sugar and boil thirty minutes. Add one half pint spirits (preferably brandy), let cool and bottle.
A plain sweetened fruit syrup fortified with a little brandy. The instructions are complete, but the proportions tell you a good deal about how the finished bottle should be handled.
- What a gallon of juice costs youFigure on the order of 12 to 20 lb of cherries, depending on how hard they are pressed, to yield a gallon (4 quarts) of juice. Sour cherries — Morello or Montmorency — give the sharpness that makes this drinkable; sweet cherries alone tend toward the cloying.
- Half a pint of spiritsOne cup. Against a gallon of juice reduced by boiling, that works out to roughly 3 percent alcohol in the finished bottle — a flavouring, not a preservative.
- Add the brandy off the heatThe original adds the spirits and then lets the mixture cool. Adding them once the syrup has cooled will keep more of the alcohol, and more of the brandy aroma, from going off with the steam.
- Thirty minutes of boilingThat is a hard reduction; depending on the width of the pan you may lose a quarter to a third of the volume and finish with a thin syrup rather than a juice. If you want a lighter cordial, boil less and accept a shorter keeping time.
- Keeping itAt 2 lb sugar per gallon this is nowhere near preserve-strength sugar, and the alcohol is too dilute to protect it. Bottle into scalded bottles, refrigerate, and use within a few weeks; it will ferment or mould at room temperature.
- Never crush the pitsSome period cherry recipes call for cracked stones or kernels for their almond note. Cherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide. Strain the juice off whole pits and discard them.
- Yield and servingAbout 3 quarts. Serve an ounce or two in a small glass, or lengthen it with cold or sparkling water; it also does well poured over ice cream or into a fruit salad.
"Cordial" comes from the Latin cor, heart, and originally meant a medicinal draught taken to strengthen it — sweetened, spiced, usually spirituous, and dispensed by the spoonful rather than the glass. By the time books of this kind were compiled, the word had drifted toward what we would call a fruit syrup with a splash of liquor, made at home in the few weeks when a tree came in all at once and the crop had to be dealt with. Cherries suited the purpose because they are acidic, deeply coloured and awkward to keep any other way. Brandy is the spirit named here, as it commonly is in European fruit ratafias. Recipes of this kind sat in the same household books as cough syrups and tonics, and the line between the two was never firmly drawn.