Home › The Principles of Cookery › Maraschino Syrup
Maraschino Syrup
Strain the juice of a large sweet orange, and pour it, with a wine-glassful of water, over three ounces of sugar; boil it to a rather stiff, bright syrup, and skim, adding a quarter of an ounce of blanched bitter almonds and a small quantity of lemon-rind, or the peel of a quarter of a lemon may be rubbed off on lumps of sugar. When clear and thick, strain, and serve with a wine-glassful of maraschino stirred into it.
This is a dessert syrup rather than a bottled cordial: a small quantity of orange-sugar syrup finished with maraschino liqueur, meant to be poured over ices, fruit or pudding. It cannot be made as printed because of the bitter almonds.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide on contact with moisture. A quarter of an ounce is roughly six to nine kernels. The almonds are strained out before serving, but cyanide is water-soluble and passes into the syrup; the reported danger threshold for an adult is higher than this, while for a child far less than this has caused serious poisoning.
- Blanching does not remove itThe recipe treats blanching as preparation, not as a safety step, and it is not one. Slipping the skins off does nothing to the amygdalin in the kernel, and here the almonds go in after the syrup has already boiled, so heat cannot be relied on to make them safe.
- They are not sold as foodRaw bitter almonds are not legally sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in much of Europe. Bitter almond flavouring on a modern shelf is normally an extract or an oil from which the prussic acid has been removed.
- The rest of the methodThree ounces of sugar to the juice of one orange and a wine-glassful of water — usually reckoned at about two fluid ounces in Victorian usage — is a very small batch, enough to dress two or three servings. The book gives no sugar-boiling stage or temperature; "rather stiff, bright syrup" is a judgement by eye, somewhere in the thread range.
- If you want this flavourThe almond note here is decorative; the syrup's character comes from the orange, the lemon peel and the maraschino. Use a current recipe for a maraschino or orange syrup rather than adapting this one.
Maraschino proper is a clear cherry liqueur distilled from marasca cherries, long associated with Zara on the Dalmatian coast, and in the nineteenth century it was one of the standard flavourings of the English and French dessert table — used in jellies, ices, trifles and syrups of exactly this kind. A sweetened syrup was a building block: cooks were expected to keep the technique in hand and vary the flavouring. The bitter almond in the list is a period habit rather than an oversight; bitter almonds and ratafia were used freely to sharpen sweet dishes, and confectionery manuals of the era treat a few kernels as an ordinary seasoning.