Brandy Cherries
-INGREDIENTS. -Morella cherries, good French brandy; to every lb. of cherries allow half the quantity of pounded sugar.
Have ready some wide-mouthed glass ttles, perfectly clean and dry. Gather ue cherries (not too ripe), and cut off half their stalks. Put them in the bottles, strewing the sugar between each layer; and when the bottles are nearly full, pour in enough brandy to cover them.
A few blanched bitter almonds or peach kernels is thought to be an improvement.
Put corks or bungs in the bottles, tie them over with bladder, and store in a dry place. The cherries will be fit to eat in 2 or 3 months, and will keep good for years.
SEASONABLE in August and September.
A straightforward brandy preserve from the Victorian storeroom, with one optional ingredient that puts it out of bounds today.
- Why the cautionBitter almonds and peach kernels contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide. A months-long steep draws flavour and whatever else the kernels give up into a liquor that is drunk rather than cooked off. Bitter almonds are not sold for food in the United States, and there is no domestic way to measure the dose.
- The sealCorking or bunging the bottle and tying bladder over the top was the standard Victorian closure. It is awkward to source now and hard to check. Any jar sealed for two or three months at room temperature needs a closure you can verify.
- Morella cherriesThe spelling is Beeton's; the fruit is the morello, a dark sour cherry. Sour cherries are generally reckoned to hold their shape and acidity in spirit better than sweet varieties. They crop over a short season, hence the August-September note.
- The sugar ratioHalf a pound of pounded sugar to a pound of fruit. Pounded sugar was loaf sugar broken and ground in a mortar, roughly comparable to modern caster or granulated depending on how finely it was sifted.
- "Good French brandy"The qualifier mattered: a good deal of what was sold as brandy in Victorian Britain was cheaper spirit coloured and flavoured to pass. The alcohol here is the preservative, which is why the strength of the spirit is not a detail to economise on.
- Half the stalksCutting the stalks short rather than pulling them off leaves the fruit unbroken, so the cherries stay whole and the brandy stays clear instead of clouding with pulp.
- If you want to make thisUse a current, tested recipe for brandied cherries with a modern jar and closure.
Fruit put down in spirit was one of the standard ways a Victorian household carried a short season into the winter, alongside drying, bottling and jam. Sour cherries ripen over a few weeks and will not keep, so they went into brandy, into kirsch on the Continent, or into pies. The bitter almond or peach kernel called for here reflects a long European habit of using a trace of stone-fruit kernel to reinforce the almond-and-cherry note in the finished liquor -- the same flavour behind ratafia, noyau and maraschino -- and it is a reminder that Beeton's readers cheerfully used ingredients that later toxicology took out of the domestic cupboard. The instruction to tie the bottles over with bladder belongs to a practice of long standing rather than to any one moment: a cleaned animal bladder, softened in water and dried tight over a jar mouth, was the ordinary household seal before commercial screw-top and rubber-ringed jars became cheap in the later nineteenth century.