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Black Currant Cordial
Mrs. Spence.
To every four quarts of black currants, picked from the stems and lightly bruised, add one gallon of the best whiskey; let it remain four months, shaking the jar occasionally; then drain off the liquor and stran three pounds of loaf sugar and a quarter of a pound of best cloves, slightly bruised; bottle well, and seal.
A steeped fruit cordial rather than anything cooked: whiskey, black currants, sugar and cloves left to their own devices for a season. The printed text has a typographical fault in the key line, so read it carefully before starting.
- The garbled line"then drain off the liquor and stran three pounds of loaf sugar" is plainly a compositor's error; the intended sense appears to be that the liquor is drawn off the fruit and the sugar and cloves then added to it. The fruit is presumably discarded once it has given up its colour and flavour.
- QuantitiesFour quarts of picked black currants is roughly 5 to 7 lb of fruit; the gallon in a Canadian book of this date is an imperial gallon, about 4.5 litres. The finished volume will be somewhat more than the spirit alone, once the sugar is dissolved.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent. Three pounds in a gallon gives a distinctly sweet liqueur; a pound or two makes a drier cordial closer to modern taste.
- The clovesA quarter pound of cloves is about a cup of whole buds — enormously assertive by current standards, and enough to numb the palate. Contemporary practice would use a fraction of that, and add them late so the spice can be tasted and stopped.
- Dissolving the sugarSugar stirred into cold spirit takes days to go into solution. Stir or shake daily until no grit remains at the bottom of the jar, then let the cordial settle before bottling; the sediment that drops out is normal.
- The vesselA wide-mouthed glass jar with a tight lid, kept out of direct light, does what the original jar did. Avoid metal lids in direct contact with the acidic liquid.
- TimeFour months is generous; much of the colour and flavour is likely to transfer well before then. Taste at a month and decide.
- ServingServed as a small glass after dinner, or spooned into soda or sparkling wine. Sealed and cool, it keeps for years — the alcohol and sugar between them do the preserving.
Black currant cordials sit at the meeting point of the medicine chest and the drinks tray: currant syrups were long taken for sore throats and coughs, and the spirituous version simply keeps better. The fruit's heavy, resinous perfume made it a favourite for steeping across northern Europe, most famously in the French crème de cassis, and Scots and Anglo-Canadian households did the same thing with whiskey rather than neutral spirit. Contributions like Mrs. Spence's are the whole method of The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877), which was assembled from recipes signed by named local women and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children — one of the earliest Canadian community cookbooks of its kind. Readers in the United States should know that black currants became hard to obtain there for much of the twentieth century, when the plants were banned as an alternate host of white pine blister rust; the restrictions have since been relaxed in many states, and the fruit is again grown commercially.