Name: Spirit of Cherries
Ingredients: small wild black cherries; plaster or mortar

Spirit of Cherries

Ingredients

small wild black cherries
plaster or mortar

Directions

Remove the head from a barrel and fill it with small wild black cherries, picked from the stalks.
Cover the cherries with plaster or mortar and let them sit for two months.
After two months, remove the cherries and distill them.
Bottle the distilled spirit and allow it to age.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.