Most summers, I try really hard to get my hands on some fresh sour cherries; I haunt the greenmarket and interrogate the farmers, trying to see when the season (which is about five minutes long) might commence. I lucked out a while back and got a ton of cherries (which ain't cheap!), and turned most of them into Maraschino cherries. But the rest I saved for Cherry Bounce, a very old liqueur.
How old? Well, it was first mentioned in print in 1681: a definition given for "confused" is "any Hotch-potch; or any mingled drink; as punch, cherrybouncer, &c." Many more citations follow throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. When ex-general and future President George Washington journeyed west across the Alleghenies to inspect his property in September 1784, he recorded in his diary that he carried, (along with two eight-gallon kegs of West India rum, "one of them of the first quality"), Madeira, Port, and cherry bounce:
Apparently a recipe for Cherry Bounce was found in Martha Washington's papers (though not written in her hand), and Mount Vernon has posted an adaptation on their website. It's one of several recipes I found, and they're all fairly similar; you mix cherries with sugar and liquor and let it sit for a while, then strain and decant. Culinary historian Joyce White presents this recipe, and I found others in Marion Harland's "Common sense in the household: a manual of practical housewifery," from 1873, and in Martha McCulloch-Williams's "Dishes & beverages of the Old South," from 1913, among others. I went with one from the 1840 edition of the very popular "Directions for Cookery, in Its Various Branches," by Eliza Leslie:
Since Miss Leslie used a mix of Morello ("morella") cherries and "large black heart cherries", I used a mix of sour cherries and the cheaper & more easily findable sweet Bing cherries. After pitting them, I pounded them with a mallet to crack the stones, added demerara sugar, and added Rittenhouse and Old Overholt rye whiskey, and let it sit:
I went for far longer than three months, on the idea that it would just keep getting better and better. After seven months, I tasted the Cherry Bounce and thought it very good indeed, and it had a nice bright red color. I wound up leaving it in the jar for another year, though, wondering if more prolonged aging would help it. I strained it through cheesecloth and a wire strainer (pressing as much liquid as possible out of the cherries' flesh) and bottled it; the color is darker after the extra year in the jar and not as transparent. I probably could filter out the tiny particles using a Büchner funnel and vacuum pump, but honestly didn't really feel the need. It's delicious, goes down incredibly easily, and tastes so strongly of cherries that I have to remind myself that this isn't artificial cherry flavor, a la cough syrup. I've so far had it straight up and chilled, but look forward to trying it in Blood and Sands, Singapore Slings, Daiquiri variations...and whatever else I can think up.
It's fairly high-proof, as I made this with a mixture of 80- and 101-proof whiskies. So be careful. A memoir by a Confederate soldier describes the author's experience with some "innocent" Cherry Bounce, when he tasted it in 1862:
My hometown of Raleigh, NC even owes its siting to the wondrous properties of Cherry Bounce: in 1769, Isaac Hunter received a license to open a tavern at Wake Crossroads on the stage road between Fayetteville, NC and Petersburg, VA (the present Old Wake Forest Road.) He was famous for his Cherry Bounce, and it became a popular spot. In 1788, the North Carolina General Assembly was tired of meeting at various locations around the state, and voted to establish its "unalterable seat of government"...within ten miles of Isaac Hunter's tavern. Four years later, a committee of the General Assembly was looking to purchase land for the new city of Raleigh, and met at Hunter's tavern and stayed there for one night before moving to the nearby ordinary run by Col. Joel Lane, which was also popular and perhaps incidentally also served Cherry Bounce. They stayed at Lane's for eight nights, and wound up purchasing a thousand acres from him. Was Lane's Cherry Bounce better than Hunter's? We'll never know, but it's a pretty good bet that Raleigh owes its location and existence to this Colonial liqueur.