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Brandied Cherries
Four pounds of cherries; two pounds of sugar; one-half pint of water; one pint of brandy. Stem, stone and weigh the fruit. Make a syrup of the sugar and water and boil it, removing all the scum. Place the fruit in a preserving kettle off the fire, and pour on the boiling syrup. After standing one hour place the kettle on the stove, heat slowly, boil four minutes, skim out the cherries and lay them on a flat dish. Boil the syrup twenty minutes, place the brandy into it, add the fruit, take at once from the fire, and seal.
Berries are brandied in the same way as cherries.
A straightforward high-sugar fruit preserve in which the alcohol goes in last and off the heat. A few of the old conventions, particularly the sealing method, need updating.
- Add the brandy off the fireAdd the brandy at the very end — The syrup boils twenty minutes, then the brandy goes in, the fruit follows, and the pan comes off the heat at once, so the spirit is barely cooked. Sustained boiling after the brandy goes in would drive off the alcohol and most of the flavouring.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of water is one cup; a pint of brandy is two cups. The recipe says to stem, stone and then weigh, so start with rather more than four pounds of whole fruit to end with four pounds prepared.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enameled cast iron. Width matters more than depth, since the syrup has to reduce for twenty minutes without scorching.
- Sealing"Seal" here means the older open-kettle method: hot preserve into hot jars, lid on, no further processing. That practice has been abandoned. Treat the finished jars as refrigerator preserves, or follow a current tested boiling-water-bath process for brandied cherries with its stated jar size and time.
- The one-hour steepPouring boiling syrup over off-heat fruit and letting it stand draws out juice and firms the cherries by osmosis before any cooking happens. It is what keeps them whole rather than collapsing into jam. Do not shorten it.
- Four minutes means four minutesCherries held at a boil much longer shed their skins and go slack. Skim them out promptly and spread them in a single layer so they stop cooking.
- Which cherriesSour cherries — Morello or Montmorency — hold their shape and acidity best under this much sugar. Sweet Bing types will taste flat and need a squeeze of lemon in the syrup.
- BrandyAn inexpensive VS cognac or a plain fruit brandy is appropriate; nothing aged is worth burying in sugar syrup. The finished ratio is well under the alcohol level needed to preserve on its own, which is why the sugar and the sealing method matter.
- YieldAbout four pints. Give the jars a month before opening — the fruit needs time to take up the brandy.
Brandied fruit belongs to the older, pre-canning end of preserving, where sugar and spirit did the work that heat processing would later take over. Butterick's book, published for a mass audience of American housekeepers in the early twentieth century, treats it as one preserving method among others — a good snapshot of a moment when both approaches sat side by side in the same kitchen. The technique itself is European and much older: German Rumtopf, built on rum rather than brandy, French cerises à l'eau-de-vie, and the English practice of layering successive summer fruits with sugar and spirit all rest on the same principle. Cherries were the classic subject because the sour varieties ripen in a short glut and do not keep, and because a cracked stone will lend a faint almond note to the syrup — which is why some old recipes, unwisely, told the cook to crack a few of the pits and add them. The closing line, that berries are done the same way, is the honest admission that this is a method rather than a single dish.