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Raspberry Cordial
Fill stone jar with ripe berries; cover close and let stand where it will heat gently till fruit breaks of itself. Squeeze juice through linen bag and to each quart allow one pound of loaf sugar. Let all come to a boil and skim well till scum ceases to rise, when remove from stove and put again through linen bag, pouring into a crock with brandy in equal proportion to juice. Stir, and when cold place in demijohn and cork for two weeks, when, if not clear, filter, then bottle and seal.
A fortified fruit cordial rather than a syrup: the sugar and the brandy do the preserving, so the only real work is extracting clear juice and being patient. Two points decide whether it comes out bright or muddy — never squeeze the bag hard, and never boil it long.
- The hinge: don't wring the bagPressure through the linen forces pulp and fine solids into the juice, and no amount of later filtering fully recovers the clarity. Let it drip, and treat the second pass through the bag as a strain, not a press.
- "Heat gently till fruit breaks"This meant the back of a wood range or a warm hearth: gentle, sustained heat well below a boil, for as long as it takes the berries to collapse and release juice. A covered ovenproof jar or bowl in the coolest oven, or a covered pot over the lowest flame, does the same. Boiling at this stage cooks out the fresh raspberry aroma the cordial is for.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was the highly refined cone sugar of the period, prized because it threw less scum. Ordinary granulated white sugar is its direct equivalent, weight for weight: one pound per quart of juice, about 2 1/4 cups sugar to 4 cups juice.
- Skimming, and how long to boilBring it just to a boil and skim only until the foam stops rising -- a few minutes. Extended boiling darkens the colour and thickens the syrup.
- Brandy in equal proportionEqual volumes of sweetened juice and 40% brandy lands the finished cordial around 18-20% alcohol, which is what keeps it sound in the bottle. Reducing the brandy substantially makes a different, perishable drink that needs refrigeration.
- Demijohn and crockA demijohn is a large narrow-necked glass jar; any clean glass vessel with a tight closure and little headspace works. The two weeks corked is a settling period — sediment drops, and the flavors marry.
- Filtering if not clearA coffee filter or several layers of dampened muslin will do it, though expect it to be slow. Racking — siphoning the clear liquid off the sediment without disturbing it — is faster and loses less.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities, so yield depends on the jar; as a rough guide two quarts of berries give somewhere near a quart of juice, which with an equal measure of brandy makes roughly two quarts of cordial. Serve it in small glasses, or use an ounce or two over soda, in Champagne, or spooned over ice cream.
Raspberry cordial belongs to a long line of domestic fruit brandies — cherry bounce, sloe gin, blackcurrant ratafia — in which a household stretched a bought bottle of spirit with its own garden fruit and sugar. These were medicine as much as pleasure: blackberry cordial in particular, and by extension raspberry, is often said to have been kept in nineteenth-century American households as a remedy for summer bowel complaints. The equipment named here dates the recipe as clearly as the language does: a stone jar for the gentle heating, a linen jelly bag, a crock for mixing and a demijohn for settling were all fixtures of a kitchen with no refrigeration and no way to filter fruit juice except by gravity and time. The recipe is a reminder that a heavy raspberry crop had to be dealt with in a week, and a cordial kept for years.