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STRAWBERRY ACID
Dissolve five ounces tartaric acid in two quarts of water, and pour it upon twelve pounds of strawberries in a porcelain kettle; let it simmer forty-eight hours; strain it, taking care not to bruise the fruit. To every pint of juice add one and one-half pounds of sugar and stir until dissolved, then leave it a few days. Bottle and cork lightly; if a slight fermentation takes place leave the cork out a few days. Then cork, seal and keep bottles in a cold place.
A strawberry cordial syrup of the old "fruit acid" type, meant to be diluted with cold water and given to invalids. Two things in the text need attention before you start: the word "simmer" and the deliberate fermentation.
- "Simmer forty-eight hours" means stand, not boil"Simmer forty-eight hours" is unlikely to mean two days over heat -- and the recipe goes on to warn against bruising the fruit while straining, which suggests the berries stay whole. Related "fruit acid" recipes generally have the acidulated water poured over the fruit and left to stand a day or two in a cool place, so a cold infusion is the safer reading, though the word "kettle" leaves the question open.
- Porcelain kettleThat is a nonreactive vessel - enamelled or glazed cast iron, or a modern stainless or glass bowl. With five ounces of tartaric acid in the mix, aluminium, copper and bare iron are all out.
- Tartaric acidStill sold as a food-grade powder for winemaking and baking; buy food grade, not a laboratory or garden product. Five ounces is a weight, roughly two-thirds of a cup of powder, and it is what preserves the syrup.
- Scale it downTwelve pounds of strawberries is a farm crop. A tenth of the recipe - about 1 lb 3 oz berries, a generous 3/4 cup (6 1/2 fl oz) water, 1/2 oz tartaric acid - behaves the same way and fits a bowl.
- The sugar ratioOne and a half pounds per pint of juice is about 3 1/3 cups sugar to 2 cups juice: a saturated syrup, and again part of the preservation. Stir cold until fully dissolved rather than heating, or you lose the fresh strawberry aroma the whole thing is for.
- Corking and fermentationThe instruction to leave the cork out if fermentation starts is sound old practice, but a tightly corked and sealed bottle of fermenting syrup builds pressure and can break. Any activity at all means the bottle stays vented, and modern practice is simply to keep the finished syrup in the refrigerator, where sugar and acid together will hold it for months.
- StrainingLadle the fruit out first, then pour the liquid through a jelly bag or a double layer of cheesecloth without pressing. Squeezing pushes pulp through and turns a clear ruby syrup cloudy.
Nineteenth-century cookbooks are full of "acids" - raspberry acid, currant acid, strawberry acid - cousins of the vinegar shrubs and part of the standard sick-room repertoire, where a sharply acidulated sweet drink was thought to cool fever and tempt an appetite that would take nothing else. That is why this one belongs with the invalid drinks rather than among the preserves. Tartaric acid, recovered commercially from the argol crust left in wine casks, appears to have grown cheaper and more accessible to American households through the middle of the century, and along with citric acid it let cooks build a keeping fruit syrup without heat, so the raw flavor of the berry came through. The compilers were writing for households with a strawberry bed and no refrigeration, for whom bottling the June crop as syrup was one way to have strawberry in January.