4 lbs. of sour and the same quantity of sweet cherries.
2½ lbs. white sugar.
1 gallon best whiskey.
Crush the cherries to pieces by pounding in a deep wooden vessel with
a smooth billet of wood. Beat hard enough to crack all the stones.
Put into a deep stone jar, mix in the sugar well, and cover with the
whiskey. Shake around briskly and turn into a demijohn. Cork tightly
and let it stand a month, shaking it every day, and another month
without touching it. Then strain off and bottle.
It is better a year than six months old.
If the Maltese cross appears but seldom in the section devoted
to drinks, it is because most of my information respecting their
manufacture is second-hand. In my own family they are so little used,
except in sickness, that I should not dare to teach others, upon my own
authority, how to prepare them. Indeed, the temptation I felt to omit
many of them reminded me of a remark made, introductory of preserves,
by one of the “Complete Housewives,” who, all five together, drove me
to the verge of an attack of congestion of the brain, before I had
been a housekeeper for a week. Said this judicious lady:—“Preserves
of all kinds are expensive and indigestible, and therefore poisonous.
_Therefore_”—again—“I shall not give directions for their manufacture,
except to remark that barberries stewed in molasses are economical, and
a degree less hurtful than most others of that class of compounds.”
Then I reflected that I might, upon the same principle, exclude all
receipts in which cocoanut is used, because it is rank poison to me;
while a dear friend of mine would as soon touch arsenic as an egg. A
large majority of the beverages I have named are highly medicinal, and
deserve a place in the housekeeper’s calendar on that account. Many, so
far from being hurtful, are beneficial to a weak stomach or a system
suffering under general debility. _None which contain alcohol in any
shape should be used daily, much less semi- or tri-daily by a well
person._
This principle reduced to practice would prove the preventive ounce
which would cure, all over the land, the need for Temperance Societies
and Inebriate Asylums.