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Refreshing Drinks
Very refreshing drinks may be made from fresh fruit when it is in season, and they will be found to be much superior to those which are made from fruit syrup. Pick a quart of fruit, and mash it well in a basin. Pour over it two quarts of cold spring water. Wash some paper in water till it is reduced to a pulp. Put this into the basin with the fruit, pour the whole into a jelly-bag, and strain off the juice. Add sugar boiled to a syrup, and a little lemon-juice, if liked. Serve the fruit-water in glasses. Cherries, red and white currants, raspberries, and strawberries, are specially suited for these drinks. The cherries should have boiling water poured over them, and should be allowed to soak for an hour or two. When these fruits are not in season, pour boiling water over three or four baked apples, while they are still hot. Strain off the liquor when it is cold, and sweeten with honey or moist sugar. It will prove a very welcome beverage. In winter-time slice a lemon and two oranges into a jug. Pour over these a quart of boiling water, add a table-spoonful of crushed sugar-candy, and strain the liquor when cold. A considerable variety of refreshing drinks will be found under the heading
A set of uncooked fruit waters rather than a single recipe, written when clarity in a glass mattered more than pulp. Most of it works unchanged; one instruction does not.
- Leave out the paperThe pulped paper is a clarifying agent, catching fine sediment in the jelly bag so the drink runs bright. Modern paper is bleached, sized, often coated and frequently made from recycled stock carrying mineral-oil inks, so it has no place in food. Strain instead through a jelly bag, a doubled length of butter muslin, or a coffee filter for a very clear result.
- QuartsCassell's quarts are imperial: 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres, so two quarts of water is roughly 2.3 litres to a quart measure of fruit. Since the fruit is measured by the quart as well, using US quarts throughout keeps the same proportions.
- Sugar boiled to a syrupPlain simple syrup, equal weights sugar and water brought to the boil until clear, then cooled. Adding it as syrup rather than as granulated sugar avoids grit in a cold, unheated drink.
- Moist sugar and sugar-candyMoist sugar is soft unrefined brown sugar; light muscovado is the closest thing now. Sugar-candy is rock sugar crystallised on a string, sold crushed. Demerara or ordinary caster sugar substitutes without loss.
- Baked applesThe recipe specifies no oven heat or time, only that the apples are baked and still hot when the boiling water goes on. Bake them until fully collapsed, and use them hot as directed.
- CherriesCherries alone are given boiling water and an hour or two of soaking; give them the full time rather than treating them like the soft berries, which are simply mashed into cold water.
- KeepingThese are barely-processed fruit infusions with nothing added to preserve them. Refrigerate and drink within a day or so; they will not keep.
- YieldThe berry version makes a little over two litres, enough for eight to ten glasses. The winter citrus jug makes about a litre and benefits from more lemon than the single sliced fruit suggests.
Fruit waters of this kind sit between cookery and the sickroom. Nineteenth-century household manuals routinely list apple water, lemon water and barley water among drinks for invalids and for hot weather, made without alcohol and often without any cooking at all. The pulped-paper trick belongs to an older tradition of fining: wine and jelly makers used egg white, isinglass or blood to drag sediment out of a cloudy liquid, and rag-based paper, which was then made from cotton and linen fibre rather than wood pulp and chemicals, served the same purpose cheaply in a domestic kitchen. The preference stated in the opening line, fresh fruit over bottled syrup, is a period judgement worth noting: commercial fruit syrups were widely available and widely suspected, both for their thinness of flavour and for the coal-tar dyes some of them carried.