Crème de Cassis

the blackcurrant liqueur of Dijon: whole fresh berries crushed and macerated in spirit for two months, never distilled, then pressed and sweetened heavily so the raw fruit's colour and scent survive whole

Origin: France

From the journey of Currant.

Blackcurrants have been grown on the Côte-d'Or since the sixteenth century, valued at first as a medicine rather than a food; an anonymous treatise of 1712 credited the leaf and the fruit with curing very nearly everything, and the resulting enthusiasm filled the poorer Burgundian slopes and the ground between the vines with cassissiers. In 1841 a Dijon liquoriste, Auguste-Denis Lagoute, found the method that made the fruit famous, and its cleverness lies in what it does not do. He did not distil the berries. He steeped them whole in alcohol and then sweetened the strained infusion very heavily, so that the liqueur keeps the colour, the aroma, and the tannic bite of the raw fruit entire, which no distillate can. Crème de cassis remains a maceration to this day, and the word crème refers not to dairy but to the French legal category of liqueurs carrying at least 250 grams of sugar to the litre; the Dijon style carries far more. That density is precisely the point, since it is what allows a small measure to colour and flavour an entire glass of wine in a Kir. The cassis de Dijon is protected by a geographical indication, and it gave its name, incidentally, to one of the foundational judgments of European single-market law.

Ingredients

Maceration

  • 1 kg blackcurrants, stripped from their strigs
  • 20 whole young blackcurrant leaves (optional)
  • 750 ml vodka or neutral grain spirit at 40% abv
  • 250 ml dry red wine (a light Burgundy)

Sweetening

  • 700 g granulated sugar, approximately (use 500 g per litre of strained liquid; see method)

Method

  1. Strip the currants from their strigs and pick off the dried flower ends. Tip them into a large sterilised jar and crush them roughly with the end of a rolling pin, just enough to break every skin without pulverising the pips. Add the leaves if using.
  2. Pour over the spirit and the red wine, stir once, and seal. Store in a cool, dark cupboard for 2 months, giving the jar a gentle shake every week or so.
  3. After 2 months, strain the liquid through a fine sieve lined with muslin set over a bowl. Let it drip for an hour, then gather the cloth and squeeze the fruit firmly to extract everything it holds.
  4. Measure the strained liquid. For every litre, weigh out 500 g of sugar. Warm the liquid very gently in a pan, well below a simmer, and stir in the sugar until it has completely dissolved. Do not let it approach the boil.
  5. Cool completely, then pour through a funnel into sterilised bottles and seal. Rest for at least a fortnight before drinking. Store in a cool, dark place and refrigerate once opened.

Notes

The sugar is not adjustable downwards by much: at less than 400 g per litre the result is a blackcurrant-flavoured spirit rather than a crème, and it will not do its work in a Kir, where a thick, sweet, heavily coloured liqueur is needed to stand up to a whole glass of wine. Frozen blackcurrants macerate very well and in fact release their juice more readily, the freezing having burst the cells; use them straight from the freezer. The same method makes crème de mûre from blackberries and crème de framboise from raspberries. Beyond the Kir, cassis is poured over vanilla ice cream, stirred into the pan juices of duck and game, splashed into sparkling wine for a Kir Royal, and used to make a very good sorbet.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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