Orange Brandy
should be made in the month of March, and, well-made, is the best of all cordials, being especially valuable on a cold morning just before proceeding with the hounds to draw Newton Wood.
Take the thin rinds of six Seville oranges, and put them into a stone jar, with half a pint of the strained juice and half a gallon of good old brandy. Let it remain three days, then add one pound and a quarter of loaf-sugar—broken, not pounded—and stir till the sugar is dissolved. Let the liquor stand a day, strain it through paper until quite clear, pour into bottles, and cork tightly. The longer it is kept the better.
The ancients apparently interpreted the word “cordial” in a different way to our later way; and their cordials were chiefly used in the sick-room.
The Saffron Cordial,
for instance, was chiefly employed to cure fainting fits, the ague, and the smallpox. I think I should have preferred all three complaints at once.
Fill a large still with marigold flowers, and strew on it an ounce of ground nutmeg; beat them grosly, and take an ounce of the best English saffron, pull it, and mix with the flowers; then take three pints of muscadine or tent, or Malaga sack, and with a sprig of rosemary dash it on the flowers; then distil it off with a slow fire, and let it drop on {193} white sugar-candy; draw it off till it begins to be sowre, save a pint of the first running to mix with other waters on an extraordinary occasion; mix the rest together to drink by itself. Take five or six spoonfuls at a time.
As Hamlet observes, on a memorable occasion: “Oh, horrible, horrible, most horrible ! ”
Curaçoa
is not only the best known of all liqueurs, but the most wholesome. It will blend equally well with brandy and whisky. The best, in fact the original brand, is made in Amsterdam, with the peel of a very rare orange which grows in the island of Curaçoa, and falls from the tree before it is ripe. The peel of this is dried, and is known in the trade as the Curaçoa of Holland, to distinguish it from other Curaçoas which have not the same property, although they are often sold in place of it. The Dutch distillers naturally keep their process a secret, but the French imitators declare that the Dutch secret is merely as follows: that five kilogrammes of dried peel of the Curaçoa of Holland and the zests of eighty fresh oranges are submitted to the action of sixty litres of alcohol (85 degrees, French measurement), and that, save in the colour, there is no real difference between white Curaçoas and brown. At all events either is very useful in a cocktail, or swizzle; and there are many restorative compounds, or “tonics” as they are called, into which the liqueur enters. {194}