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Domestic Kirschwasser
Pour a gallon of brandy over a pound of garden or wild ripe cherries or plums, crushing well both fruit and kernels. Add two pounds of sugar and let stand five weeks, when strain and bottle.
The imported Kirschwasser is made by letting the wild, ripe, black cherry ferment in its own juice, after bruising the pulp of the fruit, and stirring several times daily after fermentation has begun. At this stage the bruised kernels are added and the mixture let stand for some weeks before straining.
This is a cordial recipe with two distinct problems: the deliberate crushing of the stones, and a description of open fermentation offered without any of the controls that make it safe. Neither should be attempted as printed.
- The kernels are the hazardCherry and plum kernels contain amygdalin, which breaks down in contact with moisture and the seed's own enzymes to release hydrogen cyanide. Crushing them, as the recipe explicitly directs, is precisely what starts that reaction, and a five-week steep in spirit extracts the result into the liquid you drink.
- The dose cannot be judgedAmygdalin content varies by species, cultivar, ripeness and kernel size, so a pound of mixed "garden or wild" cherries or plums carries no predictable load. Commercially, cyanide in stone-fruit spirits is a regulated limit measured in a laboratory; nothing in this method lets a domestic cook know where they stand.
- This is not how kirschwasser is madeGenuine Kirschwasser is a distillate: the fruit is fermented and then run through a still, and the distiller controls the cut in part to manage the compounds carried over from the stones. Steeping crushed stones in brandy is an infusion, not a distillation, and shares none of that control. Home distilling is separately illegal in most jurisdictions.
- The fermentation passage is description, not instructionThe second half of the entry sketches the European process without vessel, temperature, timing or any means of excluding spoilage organisms. Fruit bruised and left in its own juice at room temperature for weeks, stirred by hand, is an open invitation to acetic and mould contamination.
- Archaic measures, for reading onlyA gallon here is very likely the US gallon of 128 fl oz, roughly 3.8 litres, though a nineteenth-century American book occasionally means the imperial gallon of 160 fl oz. The point is academic: the proportions are not ones to reproduce.
- If you want cherry brandyUse a current, tested recipe for a cherry cordial made with whole, unbroken fruit and no crushed stones. That is a different drink from Kirschwasser, and it is the one worth making at home.
Kirschwasser is simply German for "cherry water," and the spirit is generally traced to the Black Forest and the upper Rhine, where small orchards of wild and semi-wild black cherries (Prunus avium) were fermented whole and distilled on shared village stills. The characteristic almond note of a good kirsch comes from benzaldehyde derived from the stones, which is often said to be why traditional practice let the kernels into the mash at all, and why the finished spirit tastes of marzipan rather than jam. American fruit compendia of the late nineteenth century are full of "domestic" versions of imported liquors like this one, aimed at households that knew the European bottle by reputation and price but had a barrel of brandy and a cherry tree closer to hand. The same period saw noyau, ratafia and other kernel-flavoured cordials in wide domestic use; the toxicology of amygdalin was understood by chemists, and prussic-acid warnings attached to bitter almond and peach-kernel flavourings do appear in nineteenth-century domestic literature.