Sugar Syrup
Cook one cup sugar and one and one-half cups water ten minutes. Add two thin shavings of orange rind to syrup while cooking.
A light stock syrup with a whisper of orange, meant as a component rather than a dish in itself. The whole of it turns on how long you boil, since the ten minutes is what sets the final density.
- What ten minutes doesOne cup sugar to one and a half cups water starts out fairly thin; ten minutes at a steady boil drives off some water and thickens it, though how much depends on your pan and how hard it boils. If you only warm it until the sugar dissolves you will have something noticeably thinner than intended.
- Stir first, then leave itStir only until the sugar has dissolved and the liquid is clear, then stop. Agitating a boiling sugar solution encourages crystals on the pan sides; brush them down with a wet pastry brush instead.
- Orange rind, not zest paste"Two thin shavings" most likely means broad strips of rind with the pith left behind, though the recipe does not say how they were cut. Pith is bitter and grated zest will cloud the syrup over ten minutes of boiling. Fish the strips out once it has cooled if you want the flavour to stay mild.
- VesselUse a heavy non-reactive pan wider than it is tall so the syrup reduces evenly. A small deep pot will barely concentrate in ten minutes.
- YieldSomewhere around a cup and a half of finished syrup, varying with the vigour of your boil.
- What it is forIn a book of menus like this one, syrup of this sort goes over fruit cups and compotes, into fruit punches and lemonades, or as the base of a water ice. It is not sweet enough to serve as a sauce on its own.
- KeepingStrain into a clean jar, cool, and refrigerate. A syrup at this concentration holds two to three weeks; discard at the first sign of cloudiness or fermentation, since it is dilute enough to spoil.
Sugar syrup is the quiet workhorse of the early twentieth-century American dessert course, and its use here is practical: anyone planning fruit cups, ices and punches needed a sweetener that would not sit as undissolved grit in cold liquid. Fine granulated cane sugar was cheap and widely available by this period, and recipes of this vintage generally say simply "sugar." The orange peel is a period habit worth noticing, a common way to perfume a syrup, and it gives the plainest stewed fruit or lemon ice a background it otherwise lacks.