Home › The Principles of Cookery › Waters, Iced Fruit
Waters, Iced Fruit
These are very agreeable beverages, in their season, for evening parties. Currants, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, or apples may be used for making them. To make strawberry water, take a pottle of strawberries-let them be scarlet strawberries, if possible, on account of the beautiful colour they impart to the syrup-pick them carefully, and put them into three pints of very weak syrup; bruise the strawberries in it, and boil them up; strain the water through a jelly-bag without any pressure, which would make the water thick. Ice the water, and keep it in a cool place till wanted. To make currant and cherry waters, a stronger syrup must be used than for strawberries, but the exact strength of the syrup must be determined by taste.
A fruit syrup thinned to drinking strength and served very cold — closer to a cordial or Italian sciroppo than to a modern sorbet. Nothing here is difficult; the whole thing hinges on straining.
- Do not squeeze the bagThe instruction to strain "without any pressure" is the one that matters. Forcing pulp through clouds the liquid and leaves it gritty; a clear, jewel-coloured water is the entire point. Let it drip, however long that takes, and discard the pulp or keep it for something else.
- A pottleAn old fruit measure of two quarts, sold as a tapering basket. For strawberries that is roughly 2½ to 3 lb hulled.
- "Very weak syrup"Undefined here; the recipe only invokes judging by taste for the currant and cherry versions, whose strength it says "must be determined by taste." One workable reading for the strawberry version is 4 to 6 oz sugar per pint of water, with rather more for currants and cherries, whose acidity and firmer flesh want more sugar.
- Ice the waterHere this means chill it hard, packed in ice — not freeze it; the recipe adds "keep it in a cool place till wanted." These are drinks, poured into glasses, not spoon ices.
- Scarlet strawberries"Scarlets" were a recognised class of period strawberry, but the recipe's stated reason is colour: "on account of the beautiful colour they impart to the syrup." Any deeply red, fully ripe berry gives much the same result; pale or underripe fruit yields a dull pink syrup with little flavour.
- Boil briefly"Boil them up" means bring to the boil and no more. Prolonged boiling dulls fresh strawberry and raspberry flavour badly; currants and apples tolerate a little longer.
- ApplesThe recipe names apples but gives no method for them. Apple water would want the fruit sliced and simmered until soft before straining, and a squeeze of lemon helps keep it from browning.
- Keeping and yieldThree pints of syrup plus the fruit gives something over three pints of finished water once the undrained pulp is discarded — perhaps six to eight glasses. With this little sugar it is perishable: refrigerate and use within three or four days, or freeze in portions.
Fruit "waters" belong to the older European family of eaux and sherbets: a fruit syrup let down with water and served iced, which reached English tables through French confectioners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The framing — "for evening parties" — locates it in the Victorian at-home, where a cold non-alcoholic cup was expected on the sideboard alongside claret cup and lemonade. The insistence on scarlet strawberries reflects a period preoccupation with colour in dessert work, when tinting was done with cochineal and spinach green and a fruit that coloured its own syrup was worth naming. That the strength of the currant and cherry syrup is left to the cook's palate is typical of the book: seasonal fruit varied so much in sugar and acid that a fixed weight would have been useless.