Important: Safety Warning
This page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
In addition, this page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Blackberry Syrup
Make a simple syrup of a pound of sugar to each pint of water, and boil it until it is rich and thick. Then add to it as many pints of the expressed juice of ripe blackberries as there are pounds of sugar; put half a nutmeg, grated, to each quart of syrup; let it boil fifteen or twenty minutes; then add to it half a gill of fourth-proof brandy for each quart of syrup; set it by to become cold, then bottle it for use. A tablespoonful for a child, or a wineglassful for an adult, is a dose.
XII. Drying Fruits.
FRUITS are dried in four ways: 1. By slicing thin, and exposing the natural fruit, spread on cloth or frames of silvered wire to the heat of the sun, taking them under cover in the event of rain, and at night. When dry they are placed loosely in paper bags and hung in a dry place. 2. The fruit is cured after slicing by being kept in a warm oven until dry. 3. They are cooked sufficiently to make them soft and then dried by fire heat. 4. They are also dried in dry-houses, more or less simple, by continuous fire heat. This plan is altogether the most economical when a considerable quantity is dried each year. In all fruit neighborhoods these houses may be found where the fruit is dried either on shares or at a given price per pound. Pip fruits are pared, cored and sliced. Stone fruits may or may not have the stones removed. Peaches always should, and it is better to pare and slice them. Plums are generally halved, and cherries have the pits removed.
This is a medicinal cordial in the 19th-century household style: a heavy fruit syrup carrying nutmeg and brandy, kept for dosing rather than pouring over pancakes. It works fine as a modern shrub-like syrup for soda water or cocktails, with a few translations.
- The ratio, plainlyOne pound of sugar to one pint of water makes the base syrup; then one pint of blackberry juice for every pound of sugar used. A pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups, a pint is 2 cups. A convenient batch: 2 lb sugar, 4 cups water, 4 cups strained blackberry juice.
- "Rich and thick" is the hingeBoil the sugar and water only until it thickens to a light syrup; the original gives no temperature, and around 220F is far enough. Boiled much further it risks catching or setting too firm once the juice is reduced in the second boil.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) of brandy per quart of finished syrup. Add it off the heat and after the syrup has stopped boiling, or most of the alcohol simply evaporates.
- Fourth-proof brandyAn old American spirit-strength grade, usually taken to mean a fairly strong brandy, perhaps in the region of 45-50% ABV, though the equivalence is not exact. Any decent unflavoured brandy or Cognac stands in.
- Expressed juiceCrush ripe berries, warm them briefly to loosen the juice, and strain through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth without pressing hard if you want a clear syrup. About 4 lb of berries yields roughly a quart of juice.
- The nutmeg is not a garnishHalf a whole nutmeg grated per quart is a great deal by modern palates, something like 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons. Start with a third of that and taste; you can always grate in more before bottling.
- StorageThis is not canned or processed and the boiling time here is a cooking time, not a preserving one. Bottle it, refrigerate it, and use it within a couple of months, or freeze it in portions. Sugar and brandy slow spoilage but do not prevent mould on a bottle kept in a warm cupboard.
- The dosing lineIgnore it. The syrup contains brandy, and a tablespoonful of a spirit-fortified cordial is not something to give a child. Blackberry syrup is a flavouring, not a treatment for anything.
- The text that followsEverything from "XII. Drying Fruits" onward is the opening of the book's next chapter and has nothing to do with the syrup.
Blackberry syrup and blackberry cordial were fixtures of the American household medicine shelf through the 19th century, kept against "summer complaint" -- the diarrhoea and dysentery that swept through households in hot weather before refrigeration and clean water supplies. Blackberry root bark and fruit both appear in period materia medica as astringents, and domestic formulas of this kind are close to what is printed here: fruit juice, a great deal of sugar, a warming spice, and enough brandy to keep the bottle sound and make the dose agreeable. The measured doses -- a tablespoonful for a child, a wineglassful for an adult -- are why this reads like a prescription rather than a preserve, and why it sits in a cookbook at all: the line between kitchen and dispensary was still thin, and a book aimed at housekeepers was expected to cover both. Whether it did any good is another question; the astringency of blackberry is traditionally credited, not demonstrated.