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ORANGE SYRUP (for making Orangeade etc.)
Take a dozen sweet oranges and two bitter ones. Rub off the yellow rinds with a pound of sugar in lumps, and boil this with as much water as it will absorb until it is quite clear. Strain the juice, add it to the syrup, and stir the mixture over the fire for two or three minutes; it must not boil after the juice is added. Pour at once into bottles, and cork closely as soon as the syrup is cold. As rubbing the rinds of the oranges with sugar involves both time and trouble, the syrup may be more easily made as follows (the flavour, however, will not be quite so fine). Cut off the yellow rinds of the oranges as thin as possible, and be careful not to take any of the white part. Barely cover them with water, and let them simmer very gently for half an hour. Strain the liquid, and put it aside to cool. Squeeze and strain the orange-juice, put it in a saucepan over a slow fire for a few minutes, and carefully remove the scum as it rises. Put a pound of sugar and a table-spoonful of the liquid in which the peels were boiled to each half-pint of juice, and simmer all gently for ten or fifteen minutes. Put the syrup at once into bottles, and when it is cool cork closely. Probable cost, 1s. per pint.
Two methods for the same thing: an orange syrup to dilute with still or sparkling water. The first is the better one, and the difference is entirely in how the peel oil is captured.
- The hinge: do not boil the juiceOnce the strained juice goes into the syrup it is warmed only two or three minutes. Boiling fresh citrus juice drives off the bright volatile aromatics and leaves a flat, cooked, marmalade-ish flavour. The same caution applies to the second method, where "simmer gently" should mean bare trembling, not a rolling boil.
- Rubbing the rinds with lump sugarThis is oleo-saccharum: dragging hard sugar across the zest ruptures the oil cells and the sugar absorbs the oil. Modern equivalent, rub sugar cubes over the fruit until they are stained orange and damp, or zest the fruit and muddle the zest into granulated sugar and leave it an hour. The book is right that the flavour is finer than a boiled-peel infusion.
- Bitter orangesThe two bitter oranges are Sevilles, in season roughly January to February. They supply the resinous edge that keeps the syrup from tasting like squash. If unavailable, the zest of one grapefruit plus an extra lemon's juice gives a comparable bite, though not the same aroma.
- Imperial measuresA half-pint here is 10 imperial fluid ounces, about 285 ml, not the American 8. A pound of sugar to that volume of juice is a heavy syrup by design, which is what makes the bottled result keep.
- "As much water as it will absorb"Vague, and deliberately so, because it depends on how damp the sugar has become. Start with about 150 ml water to the pound of sugar and add a little more only if it will not dissolve; "quite clear" means the syrup has gone from cloudy to transparent, a minute or two after the last crystals go.
- White pithIn the second method the instruction to take no white part is not fussiness. Pith contributes bitterness of the dull, lingering kind rather than the aromatic kind, and half an hour of simmering extracts plenty of it. Use a vegetable peeler at a shallow angle.
- Bottling and keepingFilling the bottles at once while hot and corking only when cold, as the book directs, was the period's way of getting a partial seal. Today use clean bottles or jars, fill hot, cool, and keep in the refrigerator, where the syrup will hold a month or more; it also freezes well in small quantities. It is not shelf-stable in the way a modern processed preserve is.
- Yield and useA dozen oranges give roughly 700-800 ml of juice, so expect somewhere near 1.2 litres of finished syrup from the first method. For orangeade, about 1 part syrup to 5 or 6 parts cold water, adjusted to the fruit.
Fruit syrups occupy a settled place in Victorian household books because they solved a storage problem: oranges arrived in winter, in quantity, and would not keep, while a sugar-saturated syrup would sit in the larder and turn into a cold drink, a sauce for puddings, or a flavouring for ices whenever wanted. The sugar-rubbing technique described here is much older than the book and was standard in eighteenth-century confectionery and punch-making, where the oil pressed out of the zest by sugar was understood to carry the true smell of the fruit in a way that boiled peel never does; it survives today in bar practice under the name oleo-saccharum. Cassell's habit of quoting a probable cost - a shilling a pint - reflects the volume's aim at a middle-class household running to a budget, and the inclusion of a quicker, frankly acknowledged inferior second method is characteristic of the book's practical honesty, offered as a saving of time and trouble.