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White Currant Cordial
Mrs. Spence.
To every quart of white currants bruised, add one quart of best whiskey, the rind of a fresh lemon pared very thin, let it stand for two days, then strain or filter. To the above add one pound of loaf sugar, quarter of an ounce of the best ginger, and juice of the lemon. Bottle and seal; it will be fit for use in a month, and the longer it is kept the better it is.
A two-stage infusion: fruit and peel steeped in spirit, then sweetened and spiced. Nothing here is difficult, but the short two-day steep is the point — the currants give up their juice fast, and longer contact with the whiskey pulls bitterness from the seeds and skins.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of bruised currants is something over a pound of fruit; a quart of whiskey is 4 cups. The finished cordial should come to somewhat more than a quart once the fruit juice and dissolved sugar are counted, so plan on roughly three 12 oz bottles.
- White currantsThese are an albino form of the red currant, sweeter and less acidic, and rarely sold fresh in North America because of old bans on Ribes planting. Red currants substitute directly with a sharper result; frozen currants work and in fact bruise themselves as they thaw.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones and broken up for use. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the equivalent — one pound is about 2 1/4 cups.
- "The best ginger"This most likely means whole dried ginger root, bought and bruised, rather than the powdered spice, though ground ginger was also on sale by 1877. A quarter ounce is about 7 g — a thumb-sized piece of dried root, cracked with the flat of a knife. Fresh ginger is more aromatic and less resinous; if you use it, allow rather more by weight.
- Lemon rind pared thinZest only, no white pith, which turns the cordial bitter over a month of standing. A vegetable peeler takes it off at the right thickness.
- Straining and filteringCurrant pulp clogs paper. Strain through a sieve first, let the liquid settle overnight, then decant off the sediment; only filter through coffee paper or muslin if you want it brilliantly clear.
- Dissolving the sugarSugar stirred into cold spirit takes days to dissolve and will sit on the bottom sugaring unevenly. Warm a cup of the strained liquid gently, dissolve the sugar in that, and return it to the rest.
- Bottle and sealSterilised bottles with tight-fitting caps or corks. The spirit content stays high enough after sweetening that it keeps well at room temperature; the month's rest is for the ginger and lemon to marry, and the recipe adds that the longer it is kept the better.
Fruit cordials of this kind sit between medicine and dessert, and the vocabulary shows it: a "cordial" was originally a preparation for the heart, and well into the nineteenth century a small glass of currant or blackberry cordial was kept in the house as much for a chill or an upset stomach as for a guest. What is notable in this version is the whiskey — English cordial recipes of the same era often call for brandy, though Scottish ones do use whisky, and in Canada domestic whiskey was the cheap and reliable spirit. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which is why the recipe carries Mrs. Spence's name and none of her working notes.