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ROYAL STRAWBERRY ACID
Take three pounds ripe strawberries, two ounces citric acid, and one quart of water; dissolve the acid in the water, and pour it over the berries; let them stand in a cool place twenty-four hours, draw off, and pour in three pounds more of berries, and let it stand twenty-four hours. Add to the liquor its own weight of sugar, boil three or four minutes each day for three days, then cork tightly and seal. Keep in a dry and cool place.
A concentrated fruit syrup meant to be diluted into cold water, not drunk straight. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions read strangely until you realize the citric acid is doing the work of both flavor and preservation.
- Citric acidTwo ounces is a weight, roughly 4 to 5 tablespoons of the granulated acid sold today for canning and cheesemaking. In a quart of water that makes a fiercely sour solution, which is the point: the acid helps hold the strawberry colour and, together with the sugar, keeps the finished syrup from spoiling.
- Total fruitSix pounds in all, three pounds steeped in the acid water and then a second three pounds steeped in the same, now strongly flavored, liquid. The first batch of berries is spent and can be discarded or pushed through a sieve for something else.
- "Draw off"Pour or siphon off the clear liquid; letting it drip through a jelly bag or a double layer of cheesecloth will keep it clear. Squeezing the fruit gives more volume but a cloudy syrup.
- "Its own weight of sugar"Weigh the strained liquor and add an equal weight of sugar. A quart of the liquid runs about 2 lb, so expect somewhere near 2 to 2 1/2 lb of sugar. Measuring by volume will not give the same result.
- The three-day boilShort boils on successive days concentrate the syrup gradually without scorching delicate fruit flavour. The recipe gives no further detail; three or four minutes at a genuine boil, then cooling between sessions, is the sense of it.
- PansUse stainless steel or enamel. The acid load here will strip a bare aluminum or copper pan and put a metallic edge on the syrup.
- Bottling and keeping"Cork tightly and seal" would have meant hot syrup into scalded bottles, corks driven home and the tops sealed, commonly with wax. Modern practice is sterilised bottles, hot fill, and the refrigerator once opened; the sugar and acid resist bacteria but surface mould can still take hold in a warm cupboard.
- Yield and servingAround three pints of syrup. Two to three tablespoons in a tumbler of cold or iced water makes the drink as intended; it also works over plain soda water or as a base for a shrub-style cocktail.
Fruit "acids" were a standing item in nineteenth-century household books, sitting alongside raspberry vinegar and lemon syrup as cooling drinks for the feverish. The citric acid was generally said to come from the druggist rather than the grocer, and its widespread availability in the 1800s made it possible to reproduce at home the tartness that had previously required a lot of lemons. That this appears under Food For The Sick in a book published in Minneapolis and Marysville, Ohio in 1877 says something about domestic nursing of the period: a patient who would not eat was coaxed with something cold, sour and sweet, and a bottle of concentrate on the shelf meant it could be produced at any hour without a trip to town. The technique of steeping a second batch of fruit in liquor already saturated with the first is the same logic as a double-strength infusion, concentrating the flavour of six pounds of berries into less liquid.