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Orange Liquor
With a thin sharp knife remove rinds of six sound oranges and place peels in a stone jar with a quart of cognac. Place in a saucepan four ounces sugar, two gills water, juice of the six oranges, set on the fire and stir until melted. Cover, let infuse for sixty days, filter liquor through a paper filter and bottle.
A cognac-based orange cordial of the ratafia type, made by cold infusion rather than distillation. The text leaves out one step, which is worth sorting before you start.
- The missing instructionThe syrup is made on the stove but never explicitly added to the jar. Cool it completely, then pour it into the brandy and peel; adding it hot would drive off alcohol and cook the aromatic oils out of the zest.
- Gills and ouncesTwo gills is one cup (8 fl oz). Four ounces of sugar is a weight, not a volume, and comes to roughly half a cup plus two tablespoons of granulated sugar.
- Pare, do not peelThe "thin sharp knife" matters more than anything else here. Take only the coloured zest; white pith turns the finished liquor bitter and cloudy, and no amount of resting will fix it.
- Modern citrusSupermarket oranges are usually waxed and often treated post-harvest. Scrub them in hot water and dry them before paring, or buy unwaxed fruit.
- The vesselA stone jar meant glazed stoneware with a close lid. Any large glass jar with a tight seal works; keep it out of direct light, as sunlight fades the colour and flattens the aroma.
- Sixty daysThe recipe's own figure. Much of the extraction from the peel happens well before that; taste as it goes and strain when the orange note is bright rather than resinous.
- FilteringStrain out the peel through a sieve first, then pass the liquor through a paper coffee filter. Doing it in one step clogs the paper immediately. Expect it to run slowly and to need two or three changes of filter.
- Yield and servingSomething close to two quarts before filtering losses. Serve it in small glasses after a meal, or use it as you would any orange liqueur in cooking. Sweetened and at this strength it will keep for years.
Domestic orange cordials of this kind belong to the family of ratafias — fruit, peel or kernels steeped in spirit and sweetened, a preparation well suited to the household because it required no still, only time. Orange peel was among the most prized flavourings, since the essential oil in the zest gives up its perfume readily to alcohol. The commercial versions the book's readers would have known were curaçao, generally traced to the bitter Laraha oranges of the Dutch Caribbean island, and the cognac-based Grand Marnier of the later nineteenth century; specifying cognac here rather than a neutral spirit puts the recipe in that French line. That it appears in a book called The International Cook Book reflects the early-twentieth-century American appetite for continental refinements presented as things any competent housekeeper could manage at home.