Your currants must be quite ripe. Pick them from the stalks, and squeeze them through a linen bag. To each quart of juice allow a pound of loaf-sugar. Put the sugar and juice into a preserving kettle, and let it melt before it goes on the fire. Boil it ten minutes, skimming it well. When cold, add a jill of the best white brandy to each quart of the juice. Bottle it, and set it away for use; sealing the corks. It improves by keeping.
Raspberry shrub may be made in this manner; also strawberry.
Pick from the stalks, and stone a sufficient quantity of ripe morellas, or other red cherries of the best and most juicy description. Put them with all their juice into a stone jar, and set it, closely covered, into a deep kettle of boiling water. Keep it boiling hard for a quarter of an hour. Then pour the cherries into a bag, and strain and press out all the juice. Allow a pound of sugar to a quart of juice, boil them together ten minutes in a preserving kettle, skimming them well, and when cold, bottle the liquid; first putting a jill of brandy into each bottle.
Mix together six pounds of ripe morellas and six pounds of large black heart cherries. Put them into a wooden bowl or tub, and with a pestle or mallet mash them so as to crack all the stones. Mix with the cherries three pounds of loaf-sugar, or of sugar candy broken up, and put them into a demijohn, or into a large stone jar. Pour on two gallons of the best double rectified whiskey. Stop the vessel closely, and let it stand three months, shaking it every day during the first month. At the end of the three months you may strain the liquor and bottle it off. It improves by age.
Break up into large pieces six pounds of fine loaf-sugar. Take twelve large ripe lemons, and (without cutting them) grate the yellow rind upon the sugar. Then, put the sugar, with the lemon gratings and two quarts of water, into a preserving kettle, and let it dissolve. When it is all melted, boil it till quite thick, skimming it till no more scum rises; it will then be done. Have ready the juice of all the lemons, and when the syrup is quite cold, stir in the lemon juice. Bottle it, and keep it in a cool place.
It makes a delicious drink in summer, in the proportion of one third lemon syrup and two thirds ice water.