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Eau Sucree
This is a very general beverage in France, made without rule as to quantity. A little sugar and some boiling water are the only ingredients. It is considered soporific, and for this reason is much drunk at supper-time.
Sugar water, served hot, with no measurements given. What little there is to get right is a matter of proportion and temperature.
- ProportionThe recipe gives no quantities. A lump or two of sugar to a tumbler of water — about 1 to 2 teaspoons per 6 oz — is a reasonable starting point; much more and it reads as syrup rather than a drink.
- Hot or coldCassell's specifies boiling water, drunk at supper-time. If you make it cold, dissolve the sugar in a little hot water first, since it will not dissolve readily in cold.
- Sugar to useNineteenth-century households used loaf or lump sugar broken from a cone; plain granulated is the direct equivalent. Unrefined or brown sugars introduce molasses flavour the drink was never meant to have.
- On the soporific claimSugar and hot water have no sedative action. Any drowsiness comes from the warm drink itself and the hour it is taken — the same effect ascribed to hot milk.
- YieldOne glass per person, made to order. There is no point mixing it in advance.
Eau sucrée — literally "sugared water" — was for much of the nineteenth century the plainest thing a French host could offer, and it made its way into an English cookery dictionary as a curiosity of foreign habit. Sugar had been an apothecary's commodity before it was a grocer's, and drinks of sugar dissolved in water sat on the border between refreshment and mild remedy, offered to invalids, to children, and to anyone who wanted something at the end of the evening that was neither wine nor coffee. The soporific reputation recorded here is traditional rather than pharmacological; a glass of sugar water is also what you gave a guest when there was nothing else in the house, which may account for some of its reputation for encouraging an early bed.