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Fruit Drink
To each pound of picked fruit allow half a pound of sifted sugar. Mash the fruit well, place it in a saucepan, and add to each pound of it three-quarters of a pint of water. Simmer gently for half an hour, strain through a jelly-bag, and bottle. If required to be kept for any length of time, a wine-glassful of brandy to each quart of syrup must be added to prevent fermentation. A small quantity of lemon-juice is an improvement.
A generic soft-fruit syrup meant to be diluted with water or soda for a cool drink. The instructions leave the sugar unaccounted for, which is the first thing to sort out.
- Where the sugar goesThe recipe allows half a pound of sugar per pound of fruit but never says when to add it. Stir it into the strained juice while still hot and return it briefly to the heat to dissolve; adding it at the start makes the pulp harder to strain and scorches more easily.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so three-quarters of a pint is about 425 ml (1 3/4 US cups). A wine-glassful in Victorian cookery books is roughly 2 fl oz. A quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.1 litres.
- Which fruit"Picked fruit" means fruit picked over for stems and leaves, not any particular species. Raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, strawberries and blackberries all work; currants give the most acidity and the best keeping quality, strawberries the least.
- The jelly-bagA jelly bag, a double layer of scalded muslin in a sieve, or a fine nylon straining bag all do the job. Let it drip rather than squeezing if you want a clear syrup; squeezing pushes pulp through and clouds it, though it costs you nothing in flavour.
- Half an hour is longWell-mashed soft fruit gives up its juice in 10 to 15 minutes, and shorter cooking keeps the fresh top notes that long boiling drives off.
- Keeping itThe brandy is there because these syrups were bottled without sterilising and stored in a larder. Sugar at this ratio is not enough to make the syrup shelf-stable on its own. Keep it in the refrigerator and use within two or three weeks, or freeze it in small portions; if you want it stored at room temperature, follow a current water-bath canning procedure with tested timings.
- Lemon juiceNot just for flavour. The added acid sharpens sweet fruit, helps hold the colour, and makes the syrup marginally less hospitable to spoilage organisms. A tablespoon per pint of finished syrup is about right.
- Yield and servingA pound of fruit gives roughly 400 to 500 ml of finished syrup. Dilute one part syrup to four or five parts cold or sparkling water.
Fruit syrups of this kind sat between the still-room and the medicine chest. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English households made raspberry vinegar, currant syrup and "fruit drink" in quantity during the short soft-fruit season, then drew on the bottles all year for summer drinks and for sickroom use, where a sharp diluted syrup was one of the few things a feverish patient would take. What is given here is a formula rather than a dish: a ratio of fruit to sugar to water that can be applied to whatever the garden or the market has produced. The brandy is a survival of the older preserving logic, where alcohol, sugar and acid were the three defences available before reliable sterilised bottling reached domestic kitchens.