Home › Cookery › Cherry Cordial or Cherry Brandy
Cherry Cordial or Cherry Brandy
Take three pounds Morella cherries. Stone half and prick the rest. Throw into a jar, adding the kernels of half slightly bruised. Add one pound white sugar. Dover with brandy, and let it stand a month.--Mrs. E.
The infusion itself is straightforward, but the instruction to bruise the cherry kernels and leave them in the jar is the reason this one belongs on the shelf as reading rather than as a project.
- The kernels are the problemCherry stones contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide when the kernel tissue is crushed and wetted. Bruising is precisely the step that starts that conversion, and a month of cold steeping in spirit neither drives it off nor breaks it down — there is no heat anywhere in the method.
- The quantity is not trivialThree pounds of Morello cherries yields several hundred stones, and the recipe calls for the kernels of half of them, deliberately opened. This is the same hazard that makes bitter almonds a controlled ingredient, at a scale nobody today would attempt to estimate by eye. Use a current recipe for cherry cordial if you want to make one.
- "Morella"A period spelling of Morello, the dark, sharply acid sour cherry used for preserving and for liqueurs. It is not the sweet dessert cherry; the acidity is what carries the flavour through sugar and spirit.
- "Dover with brandy"Almost certainly an error for "Cover with brandy." The brandy of the period would have been grape brandy or, in Virginia, quite possibly peach or apple.
- Stoned and prickedPresumably half the fruit is pitted so the flesh gives up its juice quickly, while the whole pricked cherries release more slowly and stay intact, so the finished jar holds fruit worth eating as well as liquid. The logic of the split treatment is sound even though the kernel step is not.
- Sugar in proportionOne pound of sugar to three of sour cherries is a lightly sweetened cordial by modern liqueur standards — closer to a fortified fruit steep than to a syrupy after-dinner drink.
Cherry bounce and cherry cordial were fixtures of the Virginia sideboard, made in early summer when sour cherries came in and set aside to be poured out months later; the technique of steeping fruit in spirit with sugar is one of the oldest domestic preservations in English cookery, and it survived in the American South long after commercial liqueurs were available. The kernels were included on purpose: a bruised stone gives the bitter-almond note associated with the French kernel liqueur noyau. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is built from exactly this kind of short, initialled receipt — "Mrs. E." expected her reader to have made cordial before and to need only the proportions.