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Seville Orange Syrup
Squeeze the oranges through a fine sieve; to every pint of juice add a pound and a quarter of fine loaf sugar; stir it all up together in a large earthen pan; skim it twice a day till the sugar is all dissolved, which will take about nine days. It should be kept in a cool place all the time. Then bottle it. A table-spoonful in a glass of water makes a pleasant drink, and it can also be used in the making of orange jelly or cream.
A cold-process fruit syrup: no heat at any stage, the sugar dissolving slowly in the acid juice over more than a week. It works because Seville juice is fiercely acidic, but the sugar concentration sits below the level that makes a syrup truly shelf-stable, so storage matters more than the original lets on.
- The hinge: keep it genuinely coldNothing here is cooked, and at roughly 50 per cent sugar by weight the syrup is sweet enough to slow spoilage but not to stop wild yeasts. "A cool place" meant a stone larder; today it means the refrigerator for the whole nine days and afterwards. Fizzing, a yeasty smell or a swollen bottle means it has begun to ferment and should be discarded.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was highly refined cane sugar broken from a cone, valued because it was clean and free of the molasses and scum found in cheaper grades. Ordinary granulated sugar is its direct modern equivalent; caster dissolves faster, which is an advantage in a cold syrup.
- A pintAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz or about 570 ml, so the ratio is roughly 1.25 lb (565 g) sugar to 570 ml juice. If you are working in US measures, scale to about 500 g sugar per 500 ml juice to keep the same proportion.
- Seville orangesCitrus aurantium, the bitter marmalade orange, is in the shops only from late December to February and is sour and pippy rather than sweet. There is no true substitute; a mix of sweet orange juice sharpened with lemon gives the acidity but not the resinous bitterness the syrup is made for. Sevilles can be frozen whole to keep a supply.
- Straining"Through a fine sieve" means seeds, membrane and most of the pulp removed. Bitter orange pips are high in pectin and will make the syrup cloudy and slippery if crushed; press gently and strain a second time through muslin if you want a clear bottle.
- The earthen pan and the skimmingA wide glazed earthenware bowl gave surface area for the froth that rises as the sugar draws liquid from the pulp. Any non-reactive bowl will do; glass or stainless steel, never bare aluminium or copper, which the acid will attack. Cover it with a cloth rather than sealing it.
- BottlingUse scrupulously clean bottles, scalded and dried, and fill them full to limit the air. The original assumes a cold cellar and steady use; refrigerated, expect a few weeks rather than a season.
- Yield and useA pint of juice and its sugar give a little over a pint and a half of syrup, enough for around sixty glasses at the tablespoon-per-tumbler rate suggested. It also sharpens a gin or whisky sour handsomely, and stands in for the juice in a set orange jelly or cream.
Seville oranges reached British kitchens as a winter import from Spain and Portugal and were, by the eighteenth century, so firmly associated with marmalade that the fruit is still sold under that name. The season is short — a matter of weeks in midwinter — which is the whole point of a recipe like this: bottling the juice with sugar was one domestic way to carry a February fruit through to summer, alongside candied peel and orange wine. Uncooked sugar syrups of this kind belong to an older tradition of "shrubs" and cordials, generally traced back to the apothecary's stillroom, where sugar and acid together were understood as preservatives long before anyone could explain why they worked.