The Anne of Green Gables Experiment

My sister and I had so much fun with our Little House in the Big Woods inspired Baked Potato Experiment that we decided to try a new experiment inspired by another favorite book:

I read Anne of Green Gables for the first time when I was about ten-years-old, and I've loved the book ever since. I've lost track of the number of times I've read it and every time I am always left wondering about this passage:

"Anne looked on the second shelf of the sitting room pantry but there was no bottle of raspberry cordial there. Search revealed it away back on the top shelf. Anne put it on a tray and set it on the table with a tumbler." 

For those of you who have never read the book, Anne accidentally serves Diana homemade currant wine and thirteen-year-old Diana gets a little tipsy. Oh who are we kidding, she doesn't just get a little tipsy. She gets totally hammered.

This chapter brings up so many questions; What does raspberry cordial taste like? Does currant wine really look so much like raspberry cordial that it's impossible to tell the difference? Is currant wine something that I would like to serve at my next dinner party? If Anne's mistake had accidentally turned Diana into an alcoholic which character in the book would have been the best choice to stage an intervention? (I'm going to guess Marilla on that last one because she's all about administering tough love.) So many questions. So few answers. So a few weeks ago, my sister and I set out to answer the burning questions that all of America and Canada are wondering about (or maybe we're the only ones who care. That's entirely possible too.)

I consulted the Internet and found about 400 recipes for Raspberry Cordial. Then I did a little research to find out if it's possible to buy currant wine. I know that Marilla made her own Currant wine but making wine seemed a little out of my skill set so I decided to just buy some and I could use the time I saved for really important things like looking up people I went to high school with to see if I'm aging better than them or watching youtube videos of people placing every item they bought at the grocery store on their dinning room tables so we can all look at it (someone please explain to me why this is a thing we as a society are doing and then when you're done, help me to figure out why I can't stop watching these videos.)

So we went to the grocery store to buy raspberries and currant wine. I was convinced that currant wine would be such an easy item to find that I would easily find it at my local neighborhood grocery store. My optimism was so adorable. They appeared to have every flavor of wine but currant wine. So we went to the liquor store:

And we came up empty there too. It's as if no one in this town spends their weekends making raspberry cordial and comparing it to currant wine so they can find out if it's believable that a fictional character would have really gotten plastered from mistaking the two. Weird. So I had to settle for raspberry wine.

I couldn't decide which recipe to use to make the Raspberry Cordial, so I just sort of combined them all into one recipe. For those of you who want to try it at home: Put a bag of frozen raspberries, a cup of sugar and the zest of an orange or a lemon in a saucepan and heat over medium heat until it looks like this:

Then strain the mixture and allow it to cool (I stuck it in the fridge so it would cool faster) and add 3 cups of water. The end result will look like this:

I made a double batch because my parents, sister, brother, sister-in-law and niece and nephew were all going to be there during the cooking phase of the experiment and I imagined us all drinking large glasses of it.

My sister-in-law even humored me by wearing a shirt that had puffed sleeves:

(I know this is not what the puffed sleeves of Anne's dreams actually looked like. But when I first read the book, this is exactly how I pictured them looking.)

First we tried the raspberry cordial. It wasn't awful, but I didn't love it either. I had spent the week leading up to the experiment telling people about it and describing raspberry cordial as a pioneer version of a slushy and I think my brain was expected it to taste like one. It ended up tasting like raspberry lemonade, minus the lemonade. It was kind of lacking something.

Then we tried the raspberry wine and my sister and I thought it was disgusting. My sister-in-law loved it. At one point I suggested that someone should drink three glasses of the wine so we could recreate the effect of just how drunk Diana was, but no one cared for my idea. The closest anyone was willing to get was to pose for this pretending-to-chug-straight-from-the-bottle picture.

Even though neither drink tasted that great, and we didn't really get any of our questions answered in the end, my sister and I still had a lot of fun doing this experiment, so I'm going to count that as a success!

Have you ever tried an literary-inspired experiment. If you have, or you have a suggestion for one you'd like me to try, let me know in the comments section.