[Sca-cooks] liquor and fruits

[Christiane]

My grandfather had made his own wine and distilled his own grappa; it was really volatile stuff. Family legend tells of a great-uncle who accidentally downed a shot of some sort of cleaning fluid because my grandmother had grabbed the wrong glass jug from underneath the sink; since he drank Grandpa's grappa like water, apparently he was able to shrug off the effects of the cleaning fluid. He also smoked like a factory chimney. You'd think between that and the grappa, one or the other would have killed him, but he died after being thrown by a horse.

Anyway, Grandma used to take the grappa and preserve cherries in it. After she died, and we were back at the house after the funeral, my cousin Laura went into the pantry and found the last of the cherries, two jars' worth. We were all under the age of 21, but no one was stopping us that day. We sat at Grandma's old dining room table and ate the cherries, and drank the cherry-flavored grappa. 

Very appropriately, the cherries in grappa were nicknamed "cherry bombs." They certainly got us bombed.

Gianotta