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Strawberry Acid
Dissolve five ounces of tartaric acid in two quarts of cold spring water, and pour this over twelve pounds of picked ripe strawberries in an earthenware pan. Leave them until the next day, then strain off the liquor without bruising the fruit. Put a pound and a half of powdered and sifted loaf sugar with each pint of clear liquor, stir it until dissolved, and bottle for use. Raspberry acid may be made in the same way. Time, two days. Strawberries, 4d. to 8d. per pound.
An uncooked fruit cordial in which tartaric acid, not heat, does the extracting and most of the preserving. Scaled down to a fifth it fits an ordinary kitchen; the ratios matter more than the volumes.
- Do not press the fruitThe whole point of the two-day steep is that acid draws clear juice out of whole berries. Crushing or squeezing the pulp through the strainer clouds the liquor and gives a syrup that will not stay bright in the bottle. Let it drip through a jelly bag or muslin unhurried.
- Tartaric acid quantityFive ounces to two Imperial quarts is about 140 g in 2.3 litres, roughly a 6 per cent solution — very sharp, and deliberately so, since it does much of the preserving work. Food-grade tartaric acid is sold for winemaking and baking; do not substitute cream of tartar, which is a different salt and only sparingly soluble.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a hard cone, broken up and pounded at home, which is why the recipe says powdered and sifted. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the same thing and needs no preparation.
- The pint is ImperialA pint here is 20 fl oz, so a pound and a half of sugar per pint works out at about 680 g per 570 ml of juice — a heavy syrup, and much of the reason the finished bottle keeps at all. Reducing the sugar makes fermentation considerably more likely.
- VesselEarthenware means non-reactive. Use glass, glazed stoneware or stainless steel; a solution this acidic will attack aluminium, copper or bare cast iron and pick up a metallic taste.
- Bottling and keepingNothing is boiled, so the bottles do the work: scald them, fill cold, and store in the refrigerator or a cold cellar. Leave headroom and avoid a rigidly sealed cap, since any stray yeast on the fruit can start a slow fermentation and build pressure. Discard any bottle that fizzes, hazes or grows a bloom.
- Yield and servingTwelve pounds of strawberries with two quarts of water yields roughly five Imperial pints of clear liquor, and with the sugar dissolved something over a gallon of syrup — though the exact drain-off depends on the fruit. Serve as a cordial, about one part syrup to six or eight parts cold or soda water.
- The price line"Strawberries, 4d. to 8d. per pound" is Cassell's costing note for a Victorian housekeeper, not an instruction. It is also a hint about scale: this recipe assumes a glut of cheap midsummer fruit.
Fruit "acids" were a standard Victorian answer to a summer surplus: a strong syrup, kept in the larder and let down with water, filling the role now taken by squash and bottled cordial. Tartaric acid — a by-product of winemaking, recovered from the crust left in wine casks — had become cheap and widely available by the middle of the nineteenth century, and it appears throughout British domestic cookery of the period in baking powders, lemonade powders and preserves, wherever a clean sourness was wanted without lemons. Its use here is both flavouring and preservative, doing the job that boiling and sterilised jars would do in a later recipe. The recipe itself notes that raspberry acid may be made the same way, the two fruits being treated interchangeably, and the accompanying market prices show the book working as much as a household budgeting manual as a set of instructions.