Cherry Bounce

Old Maryland cookbooks such as “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” tend to have a good amount of space dedicated to alcoholic beverages, whether their purpose is social, medicinal, or for further use in the kitchen.

Edwin Tunis Illustration, “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland”

For typical servants and housewives, brewing and alcoholic preserving was as essential a part of duties as canning and baking. For the more well-to-do and decadent, cocktails factor in as well (this blog may be the death of me come eggnog season.)

My friends’ backyard tree was brimming with rapidly ripening sour cherries and so we grabbed the nearest “bounce” recipe and got picking.

I had several options: Mrs. B.C. Howard alone has four recipes in “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.” Plus one for blackberry bounce (I wish I had that many blackberries.)

The Hammond-Harwood House cookbook “Maryland’s Way” has a recipe contributed by Sarah Perry Rodgers who says that “Miss Ridgley” of Baltimore used whiskey and Jamaica rum and that the Ridgley’s “were known for their bounce.”

Even the temperate Elizabeth Ellicott Lea has a recipe for “Cherry Cordial,” for medicinal use such as “female complaints.”

“The addition of ethyl alcohol rather than rum or rye, and the very large quantity of sugar all suggest this medical application. The social drink, made with rum in Maryland and rye in Pennsylvania, was infinitely easier to make and infinitely easier to drink than Lea’s concoction.” – William Woys Weaver, A Quaker Woman’s Cookbook: The Domestic Cookery of Elizabeth Ellicott Lea

I went with a recipe contributed by “Mrs. Wm. Courtland Hart” of Somerset County to “Eat, Drink and Be Merry in Maryland”

Beechwood in 1967, Maryland State Archives

It seems that Mrs. William Courtland Hart was Eliza Waters, of the well known Waters family, and an heir to the Beechwood estate in Somerset County, which she passed on to WIlliam Courtland Hart. The property eventually became the local American Legion.

Somerset County in Vintage Postcards By John E. Jacob, Jason Rhodes

Time and trends will tell us which of the many cordials, cocktails and wines will soon resurface on menus about town, but Cherry Bounce remains relatively known primarily due to its association with George Washington. Washington is known to have packed Cherry Bounce on a trip west in 1784.

“As the first first lady, Mrs. Washington served Cherry Bounce in the president’s house. Abigail Adams would write to her sister about “Mrs. W’s publick day” party on New Year’s Day, 1790: The two delicacies of the season were “a kind of cake in fashion upon this day call’d New Year’s Cooky. This & Cherry Bounce,” which were the customary treats of the holiday.” – The Wall Street Journal

Hot Martha Washington. who cares?

Martha Washington’s recipe involved using the cherry pits. Some recipes retain the cherry “meat” and then when you remove it later you can use them for other purposes. That may have been a nice frugal idea but we took the easiest path with Mrs. Hart’s recipe using the juice, heavily spiced with the usual suspects of the time, swapping nutmeg for mace. Other recipes bottle the mixture at later points but we bottled it immediately.