Fruit recipes

Make with two gallons French brandy to one gallon well flavoured peaches, skinned and mashed. Add to this the pits from a peck of the fruit and let stand two months, when filter and bottle. COMMERCIAL PEACH BRANDY Mash eighteen pounds of peaches, not removing pits, and cover with four and three-fourths gallons of 95 % alcohol and four gallons filtered water, letting stand twenty-four hours. After mashing, straining and filtering add two and one-half quarts of sugar syrup and colour with burnt sugar. CREME DE NOYEAU Pound together in a mortar one-fourth pound peach apricot, or bitter almond pits and pour over them one pint water and one-half gallon spirits of wine. Cork and stir and shake each day for eight days when add a syrup made of a pint of water to a pound of sugar. Strain off the kernels and let stand another week when bottle. PEACH VINEGAR Use peaches which are over-ripe. Mash and mix with water in such quantity that the latter is strongly flavoured. To each gallon of this add four ounces brown sugar and a dessertspoon of yeast. Set the cask in the sun to ferment. CHAPTER VI THE CHERRY (Prunus cerasus: P. aviunt) HE common garden cherry, (Amygdalacee) the type of daintily gay, merrily modest beauty, of an inspiring, sweet tartness in flavour and of graceful decision of form, is of the brave blitheness of hue generally first noticed by children, which fact, and this alone, is evidently answerable for the nursery song of ‘‘Cherries are ripe! Cherries are ripe! Give the baby some’’—since, though so attractive, cherries are very nearly the most unfit of all fruits for babies to eat! They have appealed to humanity from time immemorial, from the subtly fragrant blossoms of far Japan which have influenced art itself, to the gayly dangling red clusters of fruit which have always tempted the appetite of small boys of the Occident. The cherry pie has long since been commemorated in the rhyme of the ‘‘charming Billy Boy,’’ whose sweetheart could ‘‘make a cherry pie quick as you can wink your eye,”’ while a recent coating of immortality has been applied by the present generation in ‘‘Cheer up: cherries are ripe!” And cherries have the actual material or physical element and power of cheering up certain kinds of depression, for, aside from from their unvarying cheerfulness of front which might well have a mental effect, this little fruit is considered almost a cure for some forms of bladder and kidney troubles and its “‘red badge of courage’’ is also the symbol of the remarkable tonic properties of the tree whose bark has become famous on the continent of North America as ‘‘bitters’’ and phosphates, etc. These bracing decoc- tions, as well as the alcoholic, deluding ‘‘Cherry Bounce” are, in general, manufactured from the North American wild black cherry, Prunus serotina, and the American wild Choke Cherry, Prunus Virginiana, which has the power of ‘‘calming irritation and diminishing excitability— adapted theoretically to diseases in which debility of the stomach or of the system is united with general or local irritation’ (U. S. Dispensatory).