Important: Safety Warning
This page describes additives or treatments for food or drink that are now known to be toxic and are prohibited in food today.
In addition, this page directs the use of sulphuric acid in preparing food, and recommends leaving cracked cherry stones in the pulp for flavour. Sulphuric acid is corrosive and is not a food ingredient; cherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Syrups, Fruit
To have fruit-juices fit for preservation, it is necessary, in the first place, to select fully-ripe and undecayed fruit, and after mashing the fruit it should receive an addition of five to ten per cent. of sugar, and then be left to undergo a slight fermentation. The juice after filtration becomes perfectly clear, and is much improved in flavour and colour. Raspberries, whortleberries, currants, cherries, etc., may be thus treated, but the delicate flavour of the strawberry requires some modification of the process. In this, two pounds of carefully-picked strawberries--the wild strawberry of the wood is the best--are put into a glass jar with two and a half pound of white powdered sugar, and occasionally shaken. The sugar extracts the juice, and the berries shrivel to a dry pulp, and after filtering the syrup is ready for use. Heating must be carefully avoided, as it would at once destroy the fragrance of the fruit. As to cherries, the so-called morella is recommended--and by leaving the cracked stones in the pulp, a flavour like that of bitter almonds will be imparted. In making syrup of the fruit-juices prepared as above indicated, be careful never to make use of any metallic vessels or spoons, and always to take best refined loaf sugar in lumps, five parts of juice to eight parts of sugar constituting a good proportion. The lumps of sugar are moistened with just enough water to cause them to dissolve readily, when the allotted juice is added, and the whole is to be rapidly heated to boiling, which, however, must only be continued for a few minutes. With good sugar no skimming is necessary, and filtering through flannel or other woollen cloth wetted in water containing a few drops of sulphuric acid, and well wrung, will make the syrup perfectly clear. It is best to fill the preserve jar with the syrup when cold, but if it has been done when hot, the vessel must be filled up after cooling, as the vapour condenses on the portion of the vessel left empty, and, running down, dilutes the upper portion of the syrup, and thus makes it more liable to spoil.
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This entry cannot be followed. Two of its instructions place it outside anything that can be prepared in a kitchen today, and a third relies on an uncontrolled fermentation with no measurements or temperatures at all.
- Sulphuric acid in the filter clothThe clarifying step calls for wetting flannel in water containing a few drops of sulphuric acid. Sulphuric acid is a corrosive mineral acid, not a food ingredient; it burns skin, eyes and mucous membrane, and residue left in a woollen cloth passes straight into the syrup. There is no domestic dilution of it that belongs anywhere near food.
- Cracked cherry stonesThe direction to leave cracked morello stones in the pulp "for a flavour like bitter almonds" is a direction to extract amygdalin from the kernels. Crushed kernels in contact with moisture release hydrogen cyanide, and the quantity depends entirely on how many stones broke and how long they steeped — which is to say it is unmeasurable and uncontrolled.
- The deliberate fermentationMashed fruit with 5-10 per cent sugar, left to "undergo a slight fermentation" with no starter, no acid check, no stated temperature and no stated duration, is an open invitation to spoilage organisms and moulds alongside the wild yeast the author wanted. The apparent aim is to break down pectin and clear the juice; modern practice uses a pectic enzyme or simple straining instead.
- Unsealed storageSyrup poured cold into a jar and topped up later, with no heat processing of the sealed container, is not reliably preserved, whatever protection the high sugar concentration gives. The book's own worry about condensation diluting the top layer describes exactly where spoilage would start.
- Terms in the text"Loaf sugar in lumps" is refined cane sugar broken from a cone — ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent grade. "Whortleberries" are bilberries. "Morella" is the morello, a sour cherry. The warning against metallic vessels and spoons dates from an era of tinned copper and iron pans, which reacted with fruit acids; it is not a concern with stainless steel or enamel.
- If you want fruit syrupUse a current recipe with stated sugar concentrations, a boiling step of known length, and either refrigeration or proper water-bath processing for the filled jars.
This reads like a translation or paraphrase of a Continental technical manual -- the percentages of sugar, the insistence on non-metallic vessels, the interest in filtration and colour belong more to the mid-nineteenth-century literature of the confectioner and the pharmacist than to the domestic cook. Fruit syrups sat on that border: sirops were stock-in-trade of the chemist's shop, sold for flavouring water and for coughs, and similar recipes appeared in cookery books for the household that made its own. The cold sugar maceration for strawberries is sound reasoning about volatile aromatics, and the preference here for the small wild wood strawberry over the cultivated berry is one shared by other writers of the period. The bitter-almond note from cracked cherry stones was a fashionable flavour -- noyau, ratafia and almond-scented creams depended on it.