Plum Brandy
Simmer two gallons of greengages (in barely enough water to cover) till soft. Add two pounds sugar and a gallon of brandy and let stand corked three months, when filter. Or cover two gallons uncooked mashed plums with one gallon of brandy, adding the cracked stones and kernels, letting stand as above.
This is a cordial rather than a distillation — the brandy is bought, not made — but the second of the two methods deliberately extracts the plum kernels, and that is where it fails.
- The cracked stones and kernelsPlum kernels contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide in contact with water and enzymes in the crushed seed. A gallon of brandy standing three months on the cracked kernels of two gallons of plums is an uncontrolled extraction with no way to measure the result. This is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds dangerous, and there is no household test for how much has been drawn out.
- Why the period allowed itKernels were valued precisely for the almond note they give a fruit liqueur, and small quantities were used across European cordial-making for centuries. The nineteenth-century writer had no way to quantify the dose, and quantity is the whole question here. Use a current recipe if you want a plum cordial.
- GallonsTwo gallons of whole greengages is somewhere in the region of 10-14 lb of fruit, depending on the gallon meant and how loosely the fruit packs -- a substantial picking, not a market punnet. The proportions assume a stone crock or a demijohn rather than a mason jar.
- GreengagesA small green-gold dessert plum, honey-sweet and low in acid, in season for a few weeks in late summer. They are uncommon in supermarkets; damsons and Italian prune plums are the usual stand-ins, damsons in particular being a good deal more tart.
- \Corked, not sealed -- a driven cork in a jar or jug, left in a cool dark place. Three months from a late-summer fruit carries the jar into late autumn.
- FilterCommonly done through a flannel jelly bag or several thicknesses of muslin, hung and left to drip without squeezing. Forcing it through pushes fruit pulp into the liquor and gives a cloudy, sedimenting bottle.
The greengage is a European plum brought to England in the early eighteenth century and generally said to take its English name from Sir William Gage, whose family grew it at Hengrave in Suffolk; in France it is the reine-claude, after the queen consort of François I. Steeping fruit in spirit was one of the standard preserving methods of a household that had an orchard and no refrigeration — alongside drying, bottling and jam — and the brandy did double duty as preservative and as the finished product. A heavy crop of gages ripens all at once and will not keep a week. The habit of cracking the stones for their kernels was borrowed from confectionery and from ratafia, where a bitter-almond note was thought to complete the flavour of stone fruit.