In my orange heaven

Sunday was fruit liqueur day.  I took the sloes from the freezer, and put them to macerate in the gin - it's a little late to have that ready to drink by Christmas, but there's still a bottle left from last year.  I also chopped up a quince, which is a thing I can never resist buying in the season for its beauty, its fuzzy bloom and fragrance, its echoes of the mediaeval - quince paste, membrillo, courtly walled gardens with flowering quince trees ... and its general Old World oddity - 'they dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon...'.  Once I have kept it and admired it for a time, picking it up and inhaling its perfume whenever I pass, I'm often rather at a loss what to do with it; I always have more jams and jellies than we can eat or give away, B the German Doctor makes membrillo and gives it to us, but in truth I'm not over-fond of it, and tarte tatin, should I ever get around to making it, is really better just with apples. So this time I thought I'd try making it drinkable, putting it minced fine into a mishmash of poire William aquavit and vodka I had standing around, with some almonds and other things I've forgotten what already.  Heaven knows how it will turn out but frankly it can't go too far wrong really,  that's the good thing about making liqueur and schnappsy type things.

Ad finally I did another experiment, which came to me when Tom went looking for the gin for the sloes and inadvertently picked up a bottle of triple sec, a clear spirit flavoured with orange peel, instead.

I scrubbed some clementines,

and sliced them up,

then put them in a wide-necked jar, with a few of their leaves, a stick of cinnamon, some cardamon and a good handful of coriander seeds.

I added some honey

and the triple sec ( along with some brandy and some reddish Rivesaltes aperitif to lighten and stretch it a little bit)

Then I shook it all about plenty.

It was all so luminously, fragrantly gorgeous, I couldn't stop photographing it.  

These are only a selection, there are even more on the Picasa album here, which you can see as a slide show, if you want to.

In a very short time, it will have lost its looks, and be just a mushy mess in the jar, and even when it's decanted and filtered it won't look anything special.  But the alchemical wonder of fruit liqueurs is in how the original visual beauty of their constituents is transmuted to a beauty of taste, so that the tongue and palate will later remember and re-live what the eyes saw.  

That's the idea, anyway.