One advantage of blogging fairly consistently for a long period of time is that you can check back and see if you have publicly pondered a topic before. It turns out I was thinking about lovage cordial back in 2011, having discovered it as product available on supermarket shelves. Sometime after that, it went out of production and I couldn’t even find a recipe for it online. Subsequently, some information has been published and it is being produced again and has been made available online.

However, at £26 before postage, that’s a bit on the pricy end of things. Since I have abundant supplies of lovage (the herb) at my allotment, I pulled some thoughts from reading around and decided to try my own. The method I used was to steep lovage leaves in brandy for a few days and then dilute the resulting liquid with some sugar syrup.

The result? Rather pleasant although I could possibly do with upping the sugar a bit and perhaps also adding some other steeping ingredients, like fennel seeds or citrus peel. Am I close to that drink I bought all those years ago? I’m not sure but it has produced something delicious, so that will do for now.