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Grape Cordial
To every quart of unfermented juice allow a tablespoon each of cloves, cinnamon, allspice, and one-half pint brandy, Let boil up before adding brandy. Seal.
A four-line nineteenth-century cordial: spiced grape juice fortified with brandy and bottled. The proportions are workable, but the instructions assume knowledge the modern cook has to supply.
- Add the brandy off the heatThis is the hinge. The juice and spices are boiled first, then the brandy goes in once the pan has stopped bubbling. Adding it to boiling liquid drives off much of the alcohol and, more to the point, the aromatics that make the cordial taste of brandy at all.
- "Unfermented juice"Fresh-pressed grape juice that has not begun to work; the phrase most likely marks it off from wine. Modern bottled 100% grape juice with no added sugar will do; avoid grape drink.
- Half a pint of brandyAn American half-pint is one cup, 8 fl oz. Against a quart of juice that is one part spirit to four, giving a finished cordial somewhere near 8% alcohol — nowhere near enough for the spirit to preserve it. Keep it cold and treat it as perishable.
- A tablespoon each of the spicesAlmost certainly whole: whole cloves, a broken cinnamon stick or two, whole allspice berries. A tablespoon of each ground spice per quart would be overwhelming and would leave the cordial muddy and gritty. Use whole spice and strain through muslin before bottling.
- No sugar is givenThe recipe assumes ripe, sweet juice. If yours is tart, sweeten during the boil to taste.
- "Seal"The recipe gives no method; presumably hot sterilised bottles, filled to the neck and closed at once. Treat the result as a refrigerated keeping bottle rather than pantry preserve unless you process it properly in a boiling-water bath; the alcohol and the acidity of grape help, but they are not a canning method.
- Yield and servingA quart of juice plus a cup of brandy makes roughly 1 1/4 quarts of cordial, or about twenty small glasses. Serve it in a cordial glass at room temperature, or warmed in winter; it also works over ice with soda water.
- Rest itStraight from the pan the spices are raw and disjointed. A month in a dark cupboard lets the clove and allspice settle back into the fruit.
Cordials of this type — fruit juice, warming spice and a measure of spirit — sat in an awkward and useful place in the late nineteenth-century American household. They were made in the kitchen, and were kept as a domestic remedy as well as poured for guests. The grape behind most such recipes is the Concord, a hardy native American variety generally traced to Ephraim Bull's seedlings in Massachusetts in the middle of the century, which spread quickly through home gardens and commercial vineyards. Cordial, along with jelly, catsup and unfermented "grape wine," was one of the standard answers to a surplus of fruit.