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To Make French Cherry Bounce
30 gals. Catalonia or Marseilles wine, 3 oz. essence of noyau, 1/2 lb. cinnamon, ground and infused in 1/2 gal. W ater, +" cloves, ground and infused in gal. water, 1½ oz. mace, infused in 1 pint alcohol, 95 per cent. Mix all the above ingredients in a clean barrel, and add 60 gallons sugar syrup 13 degrees strong by Baumé's Saccharometer. (See p. 46.) Stir up all the ingredients well together, and filter after four or five days. Make the color a little darker with sugar coloring, and to give a good shade add a little orchil, prepared as described in wine colorings.
To make Guignolet, or French Cherry Bounce. (1ST QUALITY.) RECIPE No. 17.
To 20 gals. cherry juice, add : 7½ 66 7½ 66 7½ " spirit 95 per cent, Catalonia or Marseilles wine, * oz. powdered orris root, infused in 1½ gals. alcohol, 95 per cent, clove 1/2 gal. cinnamon water, made as in recipe 16. + 66 " " “ " 15. 1½ oz. mace, infused in alcohol 95 per cent.
Mix all the above ingredients in a clean barrel, and add 68 gallons sugar syrup, 25 degrees strong by Baumé's Saccharometer. Stir up the mixture and let it rest eight days; then strain.
To make Guignolet, or French Cherry Bounce. (2D QUALITY.) To 12 gals. cherry juice, add 24 gals. spirit, 95 per. cent., 24 gals. Catalonia or Marseilles wine, ib. powdered orris root, infused 48 hours in 1½ gals. 95 per cent.
This is a compounder's formula from the trade side of the drinks business: no fruit is steeped and nothing is distilled, the flavour being built from essences, spice waters and coloring in a barrel holding well over a hundred gallons. Two of its ingredients are the reason it cannot be reproduced.
- Essence of noyauNoyau essence was made from bitter almonds or from peach and cherry kernels, and its characteristic almond note comes with hydrocyanic acid. Nineteenth-century compounders handled it by rule of thumb and by trust in the supplier; there is no way to judge the strength of an unspecified "3 oz. essence" against a modern benzaldehyde flavouring, and the historic article is not a food ingredient.
- OrchilOrchil (also archil; cudbear is a closely related lichen dye) is a purple-red dye extracted from lichens with ammonia. It was a standard wine and liqueur colorant in this trade and is not a permitted food color in the United States or the European Union today. Its presence marks the whole formula as a shop product rather than a kitchen one.
- Undefined cherry juiceTwenty gallons of raw cherry juice is added with no heating, no acidity measurement and no sulphiting. In the trade the alcohol load and the sugar were expected to hold it, but the recipe gives no way to verify that either was sufficient in the finished blend.
- Baume degreesSyrup "13 degrees" and "25 degrees strong by Baume's Saccharometer" refer to a hydrometer scale for density, not to weight or volume of sugar. Thirteen Baume is a light stock syrup, twenty-five a heavy one; the book expected the reader to have the instrument and its table on the referenced page.
- Spirit at 95 per centNeutral spirit at 95 per cent by volume is a licensed industrial product, restricted or unavailable to private buyers in much of the world. The infusions of orris root and mace depend on it as the extraction solvent; the cinnamon and cloves are infused in water.
- ScaleThe first quality formula runs to roughly a hundred gallons of finished liqueur. These books were written for wholesale rectifiers filling casks.
- If you want the drinkGuignolet and cherry bounce are both still made. Use a current recipe from a reliable modern source rather than adapting this one.
Guignolet takes its name from the guigne, the general name for the soft-fleshed sweet cherry, and the drink is generally traced to Anjou and Saumur, where cherries were steeped in wine or spirit as a domestic cordial long before it became a commercial product. "Cherry bounce" is the older English and American name for much the same idea, a cherry-and-spirit cordial that appears in colonial and early republic household books. What this entry shows is the moment the two traditions were absorbed into industrial compounding: instead of macerating fruit, the manufacturer buys juice, orris root and neutral spirit and builds the flavour to a formula. Manuals like this one were sold to rectifiers and saloon suppliers in the decades before food-adulteration law caught up with them.