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Cherry Cordial
Extract the juice from ripe Morella cherries as you would from berries. Strain through a cloth, sweeten to your taste, and when perfectly clear, boil it. Put a gill of brandy in each bottle, cork and seal tightly. Will keep all the summer in a cool place. Delicious with iced water.
A fruit syrup fortified with brandy, meant to be diluted at the table rather than drunk neat. The instructions are compressed, and two words in particular need translating before you start.
- "Morella" cherriesA period spelling of Morello, the dark sour cherry (Prunus cerasus), long grown in Virginia gardens. Sour cherries carry the acidity and colour this cordial depends on; sweet Bings give a flat, cloying result. Frozen sour cherries work perfectly well.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The recipe does not say how large the bottles are; if they ran somewhere between a pint and a half and a quart, as many did, the brandy would come to roughly twelve to seventeen percent of the finished volume.
- "Sweeten to your taste"Vague, and the sugar is doing preservative work as well as flavouring. A workable starting point for sour cherry juice is a pound of sugar to a pint of juice, which gives a proper syrup rather than a thin sweet liquid.
- Extracting the juice"As you would from berries" presumably means crushing the fruit, warming it gently to break it down, and letting it drain rather than pressing it hard. Hard pressing forces pulp through and the cordial is slower to clear.
- The order of operationsBoil the sweetened juice, then let it cool before the brandy goes into the bottles. Adding spirit to boiling syrup drives off much of the alcohol and dulls the fruit.
- "When perfectly clear"Let the strained juice stand several hours so the sediment settles, then decant off the clear liquid. Skipping this leaves a cordial liable to throw a haze in the bottle.
- Keeping it"All the summer in a cool place" assumed a springhouse or a cellar. Treat this as a refrigerator syrup, keep the bottles chilled, and use them within a couple of months; do not store it at room temperature as a sealed preserve.
- Yield and servingFour pounds of cherries gives roughly a quart of juice and, once sweetened, close to three pints of cordial. An ounce or two in a glass of iced water is the intended proportion; it is also good over the same cherries, stewed.
Cordials of this kind sat somewhere between medicine, preserve and refreshment in Southern households, and the sour Morello was the usual fruit for them, said by tradition to be the cherry best suited to Virginia heat. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia women, and its drink section reflects a domestic economy in which the surplus of a single loaded cherry tree had to be turned into something that would last past July. The brandy here is preservative first and flavouring second, the same logic behind cherry bounce, the older and stronger relation of this recipe, in which whole cherries and sugar are steeped in spirit for months rather than boiled into a syrup. Bounce is often traced to the eighteenth-century Virginia and Maryland gentry, and a recipe for it is commonly said to survive in Martha Washington's household papers; the boiled cordial in this book is the thriftier, more temperate descendant, made for diluting with iced water on a hot afternoon.