Cordial

Y'all may remember that back during the summer my in-laws came to visit and we went berry picking. Aaannnnddd you may remember that I went a little crazy and picked all the berries. Everyone was a bit skeptical that I would be able to come up with something to do with the 30+ pounds of berries...but I did! I first made the blueberry and blackberry shrub and then jam from the remnants of that experiment, both of which turned out pretty good if I do say so myself. I don't like wasting anything in the kitchen if it can be helped. This second project came from an entirely different source.

I'm an old soul (obviously) and the idea from the shrub came from my hero:  Anne of Green Gables. In the first book Anne finally makes a friend in Diana and talks Marilla into letting her have a grown-up tea party and invites Diana to attend. Marilla tells Anne that she may serve raspberry cordial as an aperitif but Anne, who has never actually tried it before, accidentally serves Diana red currant wine, which she drinks entirely too much of. The story culminates with a very drunk Diana and a very dramatic ending. 

Like Anne, I often jump-the-gun and give things a go without actually knowing what I'm doing. Thankfully most of my experiments don't result in getting my friends drunk on accident. I actually think they usually turn out pretty decent. The only problem is that often, as in the case with my cordial, I don't actually have anything with which to compare my end product since like Anne, I've never tried cordial before. However, I do know how to read a recipe so I gave it a go.

 Per usual, when it comes to homemade projects involving alcohol, there were plenty of people with plenty of ideas, many of which were contradictory. I ended up going with a recipe by The Backyard Farmwife and manipulating it work with what I had and what I wanted to do. The basics of cordial are this:

Fruit

Sugar

Alcohol

Let me start off by saying that by "Fruit" I mean "Berries". I have no idea if you could use a different kind of fruit. But lets be real, I'll probably have some random day where there's an excess of mango or something in my house and I'll give it a try. As for sugar, I miscalculated with the first couple of jars and decided to just go with it and experimented with more or less per jar. They all have natural sugars in them because of the berries so they were all plenty sweet in the end anyway. The Backyard Farmwife recommends using vodka or brandy so in the spirit of experimentation, I tried both.

I used 5 or 6 half-gallon canning jars. (Invest in a few of these if you do a lot of home cooking experiments. I use mine all the time.) I filled each one up to the top, not packed but full, dumped one or two cups of sugar on top of each of them, and then filled each jar up to the top with either vodka or brandy. In the end, each jar was different with either one or two cups of sugar and either vodka or brandy. All the jars turned out pretty good so I don't know that there's a right or wrong answer here.

The only thing I'd for sure do differently, is perhaps not fill them quite as high. A few got fizzy and leaked out the top. I'm guessing it was a result of the berries fermenting and releasing gas. Basically, don't fill them and high and maybe you won't make a big mess like I did.

 Over the course of the next couple of months, I'd pick up the jars each week and - over the sink - gently turn each one to reincorporate the sugar that had settled on the bottom. Eventually it all dissolved. Since the best place to leave these projects to sit is usually a "cool, dry place" (i.e., "not the garage"), they usually get set in the floor of my pantry where I can easily ignore them. So here we are, 6 months later, and I'm finally removing the fruit and separating it out into jars. I poured everything through a tea towel and squeezed all of the juice remaining out of the fruit. Because I hate wasting anything I divided up the fruit into jars for muddling in cocktails or mixing with white wine or champagne.

 Since it's alcohol, it doesn't necessarily have to be refrigerated but it's advisable. I think the blackberry-brandy combination is my favorite. It could certainly be sipped on its own. But when it comes to cocktails, this cordial experiment was a much sweeter experiment compared to the vinegar-based shrub recipe. But it also means that it has to be mixed with different, dryer flavors.

Think of the cordial like a simple syrup, just remember that it already has a pretty high alcohol content. I tried it with Art in the Age sage gin. I put some of the berries in the bottom of the glass as well and would have muddled it up with lime juice and topped it off with soda water if I'd had any on hand. I added a sprig of fresh sage for garnish to top it off.

 In the end, if you like a good fruit cocktail, I'd encourage you to give it a try. You're basically just infusing a pre-existing alcohol so its pretty hard to mess up. Just don't get it mixed up with the red currant wine and you'll be fine.

http://thebackyardfarmwiferecipes.blogspot.com/2010/11/berry-cordial.html