Home › The Principles of Cookery › Raspberry Syrup
Raspberry Syrup
Pick some ripe juicy raspberries, bruise them thoroughly, and let them stand in a cool place for twenty-four hours. Strain off the juice, and boil it with half a pound of loaf sugar to each pint of liquid. Remove the scum as it rises, and boil the syrup gently for half an hour. Lef it cool, and pour it into small dry bottles. Cork these securely with perfectly sound corks, and store for use. Time, half an hour from the moment the syrup boils. Probable cost of raspberries, 2d. to 6d. per pint.
A straightforward fruit syrup, but the sugar level is well below what makes a syrup shelf-stable, and the 24-hour standing step is doing more than the text lets on.
- The hinge: sugar to juiceHalf a pound of loaf sugar to a pint of juice is roughly 225 g to 570 ml. The half-hour boil concentrates this somewhat, but the finished syrup is still likely to fall short of the sugar level that resists mould at room temperature. Safest to treat the bottles as a refrigerator product, used within two or three weeks, or freeze in small portions.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in solid cones or blocks, broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- The 24-hour standBruising the fruit and letting it stand lets the juice separate from the pulp before straining. Keep it genuinely cool, as the recipe says -- a refrigerator is fine -- and do not extend it much past a day.
- StrainingA jelly bag or a double layer of muslin over a bowl, left to drip without squeezing, gives the clearest syrup. Pressing the pulp yields more but clouds the result.
- Half an hour of boilingThat is a long boil for a delicate fruit and it costs you the fresh raspberry aroma. Ten to fifteen minutes at a gentle simmer gives a pourable syrup with much more of the fruit character; if you want it thicker, reduce further and accept the cooked-jam flavour the original assumes.
- SkimmingThe scum is protein and fine pulp. Take it off with a metal spoon as it forms, or the bottled syrup will throw a sediment.
- Bottles and corksSound corks are no longer the best available seal. Sterilise small bottles or jars in the oven at 275F, fill while the syrup is still hot, and close with new screw caps.
- Yield and useThe finished quantity will depend on how far the half-hour boil reduces it, so measure rather than assume. It is meant for diluting with still or sparkling water, spooning over milk puddings and ices, or flavouring a trifle.
- The price noteTwopence to sixpence a pint is the book's own estimate of the seasonal market price of raspberries.
Fruit syrups occupy an odd middle ground in nineteenth-century household books: half preserve, half medicine. Raspberry syrup and raspberry vinegar were both stocked in the still-room as summer drinks and as soothing remedies for sore throats, a use inherited from the older apothecary tradition of fruit robs and juleps. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, the later reissued and expanded version of a Dictionary of Cookery belonging to the 1870s, was written for households that bought fruit by the pint from a barrow and had to do something with it before it spoiled; the costing note at the end appears in thousands of its entries, letting a cook or a mistress reckon the price of a dish before committing to it.