Nine pounds of the best red cherries, nine pints of claret, eight ounces of cinnamon, three ounces of nutmegs; bruise your spice, stone your cherries, and steep them in the wine; then add to them half a handful of rosemary, half a handful of balm, and one quarter of a handful of sweet marjoram. Let them steep in an earthen pot twenty-four hours, and, as you put them into the alembic to distil them, bruise them with your hands; make a gentle fire under them, and distil by slow degrees. You may mix the waters at your pleasure when you have drawn them all. Sweeten it with loaf sugar; then strain it into another glass vessel, and stop it close that the spirits may not escape.
A very fine Cordial.
One ounce of syrup of gilliflowers, one dram of confection of alkermes, one ounce and a half of borage water, the like of mint water, as much of cinnamon water, well mixed together, bottled and corked. In nine days it will be ready for drinking.
Cup.
Take the juice of three lemons and the peel of one, cut very thin; add a pint, or rather more, of water, and about half a pound of white sugar, and stir the whole well; then add one bottle of sherry, two bottles of cyder, and about a quarter of a nutmeg grated down. Let the cup be well mixed up, and add a few heads of borage, or balm if you have no borage; put in one wine glass of brandy, and then add about another quarter of a nutmeg. Let it stand for about half an hour in ice before it is used.
If you take champagne instead of cyder, so much the better.
Elder-flower Water.
To every gallon of water take four pounds of loaf sugar, boiled and clarified with eggs, according to the quantity, and thrown hot upon the elder-flowers, allowing a quart of flowers to each gallon. They must be gathered when the weather is quite dry, and when they are so ripe as to shake off without any of the green part. When nearly cold, add yest in proportion to the quantity of liquor; strain it in two or three days from the flowers, and put it into a cask, with two or three table-spoonfuls of lemon-juice to every two gallons. Add, if you please, a small quantity of brandy, and, in ten months, bottle it.
Elderberry Syrup.
Pick the elderberries when full ripe; put them into a stone jar, and set them in the oven, or in a kettle of boiling water, till the jar is hot through. Take them out, and strain them through a coarse cloth, wringing the berries. Put them into a clean kettle, with a pound of fine Lisbon sugar to every quart of juice. Let it boil, and skim it well. When clear and fine, put it into a jar. When cold, cover it down close, and, when you make raisin wine, put to every gallon of wine half a pint of elder syrup.