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Blackberry Cordial
Take one quart of blackberry juice and one pound of sugar, add a tablespoonful each of cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and boil together for twenty minutes. Seal in sterilized jars.
A spiced blackberry syrup, bottled hot and diluted at the table. The recipe is short because it assumes you already know how to get juice out of berries and how the household put up preserves.
- "Cordial" means syrup, not liqueurThe recipe contains no spirit at all. The finished product is a sweet concentrate meant to be diluted with cold water or soda water, over ice.
- Getting the quart of juiceFigure on 3 to 3 1/2 lb of blackberries for a quart of juice. Crush them, warm gently until they collapse and release liquid, then strain through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth. Pressing hard gives more juice but a cloudy syrup.
- The spice is the thing to reconsiderFour tablespoons of spice to a quart of juice is a very heavy hand by modern taste, and the original may well intend whole spices rather than ground powders, though it does not say. Ground spice at that volume will make the syrup gritty and muddy; tie whole spices in muslin and lift them out at the end.
- Twenty minutes at a full boilTwenty minutes' boiling -- long enough to reduce a quart of thin juice noticeably and thicken it with the pound of sugar. How far it reduces depends on your pan and heat, so judge by eye: for a pourable syrup, stop when it coats a spoon.
- Sugar ratioOne pound is about 2 1/4 cups granulated. That is less sugar than a jelly recipe, so the syrup will not set, and it also means the sugar alone will not preserve it indefinitely.
- "Seal in sterilized jars" is not a modern processHot-filling and sealing was standard practice when this was written. Blackberry juice is acidic and sugared, so the spoilage risk is mould and yeast rather than anything dangerous, but a hot-fill seal is unreliable. Either follow a current tested water-bath procedure for fruit syrups, or simply refrigerate the bottled syrup and use it within a few weeks; it also freezes well.
- Yield and useSomething over a pint of syrup. It is equally good over ice cream, stirred into plain yoghurt, or brushed on a cake.
Blackberry cordial was, in the nineteenth century, often a brandy preparation kept in the medicine cupboard as much as the sideboard: blackberry root and juice were long-standing household remedies for summer complaint and dysentery, and "blackberry brandy" appears in domestic medicine books alongside the cookery ones. Temperance collections like this one reclaimed the familiar names of alcoholic drinks and rebuilt them without the spirit. The heavy load of cloves, allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg is often taken as a holdover from that medicinal ancestry, where warming spices were considered part of the treatment rather than merely a flavour, and it also suited an era when spiced shrubs and syrups diluted with water were the standard cold drink of a farmhouse in July.