A friend asked me last week to recommend something historically correct to drink this Independence Day. Colonial America consumed vast quantities of rum grogs, whiskey flips, shrubs, toddies, stone fences, and other concoctions now equally obscure. But it did get me thinking about what was once a widely enjoyed colonial quaff, cherry bounce, which is worthy of being reinvented along modern lines.
But first, we need to take a little detour.
Although he had a long and productive lifetime writing poetry, Robert Herrick is now remembered almost exclusively for a single poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” — better known by its first line: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”
He had good reason to write about the ephemerality of life. Born during the stable reign of Queen Elizabeth, Herrick was an adolescent when James I assumed the throne. The poet would live through the mid-17th-century English civil war. A royalist, Herrick was at first on the losing side of things: “To the Virgins” was published a year before Charles I was beheaded. But Herrick, who made it into his 80s, lived long enough to see Charles II crowned.
There were other poems of Herrick’s that, though now forgotten, were widely known, memorized, and recited for a couple of centuries after he put down his pen. Among the most popular was the love poem “Cherry Ripe,” a paean to his lover’s lips. It begins like this:
“Cherry ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry,
Full and fair ones; come and buy:
If so be, you ask me where
They do grow? I answer, there,
Where my Julia’s lips do smile;
There’s the land, or cherry-Isle”
The poem was well enough known that it was parodied, turned into a boozy advertisement for a liquor that is now as forgotten as the original poem itself. In an 1826 book called The Universal Songster; or, Museum of Mirth, you will find a spoof on Herrick that begins:
“CHERRY Bounce, Cherry bounce, bounce I cry,
Fill a full glass on the sly;
If so be you ask me where,
To the wine vaults we’ll repair,
When we heavy wet renounce,
That’s the time for cherry bounce!”
So, what is this cherry bounce? The best-known recipe for it comes down to us from Martha Washington. Not only did her kitchen produce copious amounts of the cherry liquor, but she would pack bottles of it into George’s saddlebags when he would go off surveying or soldiering.
“Extract the juice of 20 pounds well ripend Morrella cherrys,” her recipe begins, suggesting from the start that making cherry bounce is a laborious task. Expensive too, as the next ingredient is “10 quarts of old French brandy.” Add some sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, together with “a pint and half of cherry kirnels that have been gently broken in a mortar.” Let it sit and steep for a couple of months, and “then bottle it.”
If you’re a DIYer with plenty of quarantine time on your hands, have at it. But I doubt cherry bounce will ever bounce back as long as making it is so hard. Which got me thinking about creating a cherry bounce cocktail that would be easy to make and, if not exactly historically accurate, still a fine, historically evocative way to celebrate the Fourth of July.
I started off with French brandy. That’s the easy part. It’s the cherry part of the equation that is the trickiest. Where are we going to get our cherry flavor? Not from a kirsch-style white liquor made from cherries. That sort of cherry brandy is lovely but only very subtly suggests the fruit from which it is made.
What we need is a cherry liqueur, and there are two I have in mind. The first is cherry Heering, a syrupy cherry cordial from Denmark. The second is a fortified “cherry wine” called kijafa, originally Danish but now made in Finland. I found that whereas the Heering was a little heavy, the kijafa was light but flavorful.
So, after some experimentation (somebody’s got to do it), here’s my modern take on a colonial classic:
Cherry Bounce Cocktail
1 1/2 oz cognac
1 oz cherry kijafa
Juice of 1/4 lime
1 dash Angostura bitters
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
