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To Make Cherry Bounce
5 oz. cloves, 1 lb. allspice, 1/2 lb. cinnamon, 1/2 lb. mace. Grind up all the above ingredients and infuse them in the spirit for 10 days, stir every day and filter. Then put the spirit thus perfumed in a barrel, and add 85 gals. water and 5 gals. elderberry juice (see "Recipe No. 9"), and 50 lbs. sugar, which must be dissolved in the water. Stir fifteen minutes, and when clear, filter. Cherry juice may be substituted for the elderberry juice and is perhaps better. (See "Recipe No. 12.") To make Cherry Bounce. (SUPERFINE.) RECIPE No. 15.
To 15 gals. cherry juice, add : 15 spirit 80 per cent, 30 66 Catalonia or Marseilles wine, 1½ oz. essence of noyau, 66 3 mace, infused in 1 quart alcohol 95, + 1/2 lb. cinnamon, ground and infused in 1/2 gal. water. 66 " “ " 66 cloves 1 quart Put all the above ingredients in a clean barrel and add 60 gallons sugar syrup, 25 degrees strong by Baumé's Saccharometer. (See page 35, "Hydrometer.") Stir up the ingredients well, and filter after four or five days. If the color is not deep enough add a little sugar coloring. The above recipe contemplates the manufacture of 120 gallons, but a much smaller quantity may be made by reducing the quantity of each ingredient and observ ing the same proportion in all.
To make Cherry Bounce. (2D QUALITY.) RECIPE No. 16.
To 12 gals. cherry juice, add : “ 30 spirit, 80 per cent,
This is a rectifier's formula rather than a household one: it builds a cordial from neutral spirit, fruit juice, syrup and spice infusions at a scale of 120 gallons. Several things about the text as it survives make it unusable, and one ingredient is a genuine hazard.
- The quantities are incompleteThe transcription carries blank or dropped figures throughout — "lb. cinnamon," "lb. mace," the run of ditto marks in Recipe No. 15, and Recipe No. 16 breaking off mid-list. There is no honest way to reconstruct what the missing numbers were, and guessing at spice loadings in a 120-gallon batch is not a reconstruction, it is invention.
- Essence of noyauNoyau essence was distilled from bitter almonds or from peach, cherry and apricot kernels, all of which carry amygdalin that converts to hydrogen cyanide. Nineteenth-century essences were sold at wildly variable strength and were a recognised source of poisoning; the flavouring compounds sold under the name today are regulated for hydrocyanic acid content and are not the same material this book assumed.
- Cherry and elderberry juiceElderberry in particular contains cyanogenic glycosides in the raw fruit, stems and unripe berries, which is why elderberry preparations are normally heated. The book's cross-referenced juice recipes are not on this page, so there is no way to know whether the juice was cooked, preserved, or simply pressed.
- Scale and legalityThe batch is 120 gallons of a sweetened spirit compounded from bulk neutral alcohol. Compounding and bottling spirits in that quantity is licensed activity in essentially every jurisdiction, quite apart from the recipe's other problems.
- What the units meant"Spirit 80 per cent" in a rectifier's book of this period most likely means 80 per cent alcohol rather than 80 proof, though the text does not say which scale of measurement is intended. "Sugar syrup, 25 degrees Baume" is a density reading -- a heavy syrup of roughly 45 to 50 per cent sugar by weight -- and the book points the reader to its own hydrometer chapter because the figure is meaningless without one.
- Sugar coloringThe "sugar coloring" called for at the end is caramel colour, made by scorching sugar. Its purpose here is cosmetic: to give the finished product the depth of a long-macerated fruit cordial.
- If you want cherry bounceUse a current recipe. Household cherry bounce — fruit, sugar and a bottle of whiskey or brandy, left to stand — is a straightforward thing to make and involves none of this.
Cherry bounce is an American colonial drink, generally traced to English fruit cordials and made at home by steeping sour cherries with sugar in brandy, rum or whiskey; it is often said to have been a favourite of the Washingtons, and a version appears among the receipts associated with Martha Washington's household. What appears here is something quite different: not a farmhouse infusion but a commercial imitation of one. Books like this were written for rectifiers — firms that bought neutral spirit by the barrel and turned it into branded brandies, whiskies and cordials with essences, spices, syrup and caramel colour. The trade flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the resulting flood of compounded liquor sold under names implying age and origin is precisely what drove the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 and, later, federal food and drug labelling law. The presence of noyau essence, elderberry juice as the base with cherry juice offered only as an optional substitute, and a closing instruction to darken the colour if it looks too pale tells you exactly what the customer was meant to believe he was buying.