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Dewberry Cordial
To one quart juice put one pound loaf sugar and boil these together fifteen minutes. When cool, add one gill brandy, one tablespoonful mace, cloves, and allspice powdered. Bottle and cork tightly.--Mrs. A. D. Dewberry Cordial.
Two quarts strained juice, one pound loaf sugar, four grated nutmegs, one-half ounce pulverized cinnamon, one-quarter ounce pulverized cloves, one-quarter ounce pulverized cloves, one-quarter ounce pulverized allspice. Simmer all together for thirty minutes, in a saucepan tightly covered to prevent evaporation. Then strain through a cloth, and, when cold, add one pint best French brandy. Bottle and cork tightly.--Mrs.D.R.
Two contributed versions of the same cordial sit side by side here; they differ mainly in the amount of brandy and in how long the juice is cooked. Both are essentially a spiced sweet fruit syrup fortified at the end, and both need refrigeration once bottled.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. In Mrs. A. D.'s version that gives roughly a 4-5 percent alcohol result — flavoring, not a preservative.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a hard cone and broken or scraped off as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- DewberriesRubus flagellaris and its relatives, trailing brambles that ripen a couple of weeks before upright blackberries. Cultivated blackberries are the practical substitute; figure about 4 lb of berries, crushed and pressed, per quart of juice.
- A duplicated lineThe second recipe lists a quarter ounce of pulverized cloves twice. This looks like a repetition in the printed text rather than two separate additions — a quarter ounce is already assertive.
- Spice quantitiesA tablespoon of powdered mace in the first version and four grated nutmegs in the second (a whole nutmeg grates to roughly two teaspoons) read as very heavy by modern taste. Half those amounts, added as whole or cracked spice so it can be strained out cleanly, gives a cordial that still tastes of fruit.
- The covered panThe instruction to keep the saucepan tightly covered for the thirty-minute simmer is the point of the method: the aromatic oils in clove, cinnamon and nutmeg leave with the steam. Uncovered, you boil off most of what you paid for.
- Add the brandy coldBoth versions wait until the syrup is cool. Alcohol stirred into hot syrup flashes off, and the cordial ends up weaker and flatter.
- Keeping itCorked bottles at room temperature were normal in a house with a cool cellar and a rapid turnover. With this ratio of sugar to juice and this little spirit, treat it as a refrigerated syrup and use it within a few weeks.
- Yield and servingThe second recipe makes something over two quarts. Cordials of this kind were generally taken in small glasses, a couple of ounces at a time, and it works equally well over soda or in a whiskey cocktail.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first published 1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why the same dish often appears two or three times in slightly different hands, each signed with initials. Fruit cordials of this kind sat on the line between the sideboard and the medicine shelf: blackberry and dewberry preparations were widely kept in Southern households as a household remedy for summer bowel complaints, a use generally traced to the astringency of the fruit rather than to any tested effect, and the heavy dosing of clove, cinnamon, mace and nutmeg belongs to that medicinal tradition as much as to pleasure drinking. Dewberries had a further advantage in that they grew wild along fence rows and field edges and cost nothing but the scratches, so the chief cash outlay was the sugar and the bottle of French brandy — the one imported luxury in the list, and the item a contributor would specify by name.