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White Currant Brandy
To each half-gallon currant juice add one quart spirits and two pounds sugar. Let stand undisturbed three months before bottling.
A steeped cordial rather than a distilled brandy: juice, sugar and bought spirit left to marry. The only real work is getting the juice clean and the alcohol strength high enough.
- What "spirits" means hereIn household books of this period it generally meant brandy or a plain grain spirit, often stronger than a modern 40% bottling, though the recipe does not say. Use the highest proof you can buy, to keep the finished cordial's alcohol as high as possible.
- Why strength is the hingeHalf a gallon of juice to one quart of spirit is a wide dilution. At 40% spirit the finished liquid sits somewhere around 11-13% alcohol, and with two pounds of sugar and wild yeast from raw fruit it may begin to ferment in the jar. A stronger spirit, a scrupulously clean vessel and a tight seal are what keep it stable.
- MeasuresHalf a gallon is 8 cups of juice, one quart is 4 cups of spirit, two pounds of sugar is about 4½ cups. Allowing for the volume the sugar adds, that gives roughly 3½ quarts of finished cordial, or about fourteen half-pint bottles.
- Getting the juiceWhite currants need crushing and light warming, not boiling, to release juice; strain through a jelly bag and let it settle so you bottle liquid rather than pulp. Something in the order of 3-5 lb of fruit yields a quart of juice, depending on how hard you press, so this recipe wants roughly 6-10 lb.
- Dissolve the sugar firstStir the sugar into the juice until it is fully dissolved before the spirit goes in. Alcohol slows sugar dissolution, and undissolved sugar sinks and sits as a syrupy layer for the whole three months.
- Where it standsUndisturbed means undisturbed: a full, sealed glass vessel, dark, cool, no ullage to speak of. Sediment will drop over the three months, so rack off the clear liquid rather than tipping the jar into bottles.
- ServingThis is a sweet cordial in the ratafia family, poured in small glasses after a meal. Sealed and kept cool it should hold well, and the colour is likely to deepen with time.
White currants are not a separate species but a pale-fruited form of the red currant, Ribes rubrum, milder and less acid than the red, which is why they were favoured for clear cordials and for jelly meant to look delicate. Fruit-and-spirit recipes like this one belong to the long tradition of household ratafias and "brandies" — the word here means a flavoured, sweetened spirit, since no still is involved and none was expected in a domestic kitchen. Currants were a fixture of American and British kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century, and the flood of currant recipes in books of this era reflects a glut of a crop that ripens all at once and will not keep. That abundance did not last in the United States: currant and gooseberry bushes were found to host white pine blister rust, and cultivation was widely restricted in the early twentieth century, which is a large part of why the fruit is now unfamiliar to American cooks who would have taken it for granted when this was written.