No. 3660

Brandy Cherries

Cerises a l'Eau de Vie

Cook two and a half pounds of sugar to "small crack" (No. 171); as soon as it reaches this degree take the pan from the fire and add slowly to it one gallon of brandy and a fourth part of a vanilla bean; leave this till cold. Cut off half of the cherry stalks, range the fruit in glass bottles and cover with the above liquid. Cork the bottles hermetically when the cherries are cold and put away in a cool place.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's formula is a syrup-and-spirit steep rather than a cooked preserve, and it is scaled for a restaurant cellar. The two things to get right are the sugar stage and the proportion of alcohol.

"Small crack"The petit cassé stage falls at roughly 275–280°F on a candy thermometer, just below the hard crack; Ranhofer's No. 171 describes the stages by test rather than in modern thermometer terms. A drop in cold water should form a thread that is brittle but still bends slightly before snapping.
Adding spirit to hot sugarTake the pan well away from the burner before the brandy goes in. Vapour off a gallon of 40 percent spirit near an open flame is the real hazard here, not the sugar. Pour in a slow stream and expect vigorous steam.
ScaleThis is a restaurant quantity. A tenth of the recipe — about 1½ cups brandy, 4 oz sugar, a scrap of vanilla — makes about one jar and is a more sensible trial.
The brandyThe recipe says only "brandy"; cognac or a comparable grape brandy at about 40 percent is the likely intention. A cheaper VS cognac or armagnac is the right register; anything sweetened or flavoured will fight the syrup.
The cherriesSour cherries — Morello or Montmorency — hold their shape and acidity against the sugar far better than sweet varieties. Leave them whole and unpricked, with stones in; the shortened stalk is presumably left as a handle for lifting them, though Ranhofer does not say so, and his wording is ambiguous as to whether each stalk is halved or half the stalks removed.
"Cork hermetically"Use clean jars with tight-fitting lids rather than corks, and fill so the fruit stays fully submerged. The alcohol does the preserving, so no processing or water bath is called for, but exposed fruit above the liquid will discolour.
WaitingThe recipe gives no maceration time. Two to three months in a cool dark place is the usual minimum before the syrup and the fruit have exchanged anything worth tasting; they improve for a year and keep for several.
ServingTwo or three cherries with a spoonful of their liquor, in a small glass, as a digestif or spooned over ice cream. The steeping liquid on its own is a good substitute for cherry brandy in cocktails.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete restaurant reference, and its preserving chapter reads like a French provincial kitchen transplanted to Manhattan — hence the French title alongside the English. Cerises à l'eau-de-vie are an old fixture of eastern and central France, particularly around Fougerolles and the Jura, where sour cherries and cheap fruit spirit were both to hand; the technique of drowning fruit in sweetened alcohol predates canning by centuries and was one of the few ways a household could hold summer fruit whole and unbroken through the winter. The half-cut stalk looks like a serving convention rather than a technical one: it would let a guest lift the cherry from the glass without a spoon. Ranhofer's neighbouring entry for brandy figs shows the same syrup-and-spirit method applied to other fruit.