Home › Beverages, Ices and Candies › Cherry Syrup
Cherry Syrup
Take six pounds of cherries, and bruise them; pour on a pint and a half of hot water, and boil for fifteen minutes; strain through a flannel bag, and add three pounds of sugar; boil half an hour or more, or until the liquid will sink to the bottom of a cup of water (try it with a teaspoonful of the liquid); then turn into jelly-cups, and cover with paper dipped in the white of an egg. A syrup may thus be prepared of any fruit.
This is a fruit syrup boiled to the candy-maker's ball stage, which puts it closer to a thick pourable preserve than to the thin syrups sold today. The hinge is the cold-water test: stop when you reach the consistency you actually want, not when the clock says so.
- The cold-water test, in numbersLiquid that "sinks to the bottom of a cup of water" and holds together indicates a heavy syrup, probably somewhere near soft-ball stage (roughly 235-240F), though the old test is approximate rather than exact. For a syrup you can pour over ice or stir into soda water, stop earlier, nearer 220F; the full half hour will give you something stiff enough to spoon.
- Choose sour cherriesThe recipe names no variety, but tart cherries such as Morello or Montmorency carry the acid that makes the flavour read as cherry rather than as sugar. Sweet Bings will need the juice of a lemon or two to keep the result from tasting flat.
- Pits"Bruise them" means crushing the fruit; the recipe does not say whether to pit first, and crushing the stones along with the flesh contributes a faint almond note. If that makes you uneasy, pit the cherries first; the yield of juice is much the same.
- Flannel bagA jelly bag. Doubled cheesecloth in a sieve, or a clean cotton pillowcase, does the same job. Let it drip rather than squeezing if you want a clear syrup.
- Jelly-cups and the egg-white paperJelly-cups are small straight-sided glasses. Paper dipped in egg white was pasted over the rim and shrank tight as it dried, an air seal but not a sterile one. Use clean jars with lids and keep the finished syrup in the refrigerator, where a syrup this sugary will hold for months.
- Water quantityA pint and a half of water to six pounds of fruit looks scant but is correct; the cherries release most of the liquid themselves. The finished quantity will depend on how far you boil it down.
- Watch the pan late onOnce the mixture passes about 225F it thickens quickly and scorches on the bottom without warning. Use a heavy pan, stir at the end, and skim the foam for a clearer result.
Fruit syrups were a staple of the household still-room long before they were a soda-fountain product, and their versatility is worth noting: the same boiled sugar-and-juice concentrate was diluted with water for a summer drink, poured over shaved ice, frozen into a water ice, or spooned out for an invalid whose appetite had failed. Cherries were an obvious candidate because sour varieties glut all at once in high summer and keep badly, and because the acid in them helps the syrup hold. The closing line -- "a syrup may thus be prepared of any fruit" -- is the real point of the entry; books of this period taught a method and expected the cook to apply it to whatever the orchard or market offered. The egg-white paper seal was common in American and British preserving instructions through the nineteenth century, and such paper seals persisted well after home canning jars with rubber rings became available.