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Pumpkin Syrup
Take 1 good-sized pumpkin (ripe), wash well and remove most of the seeds and soft center. Cut the flesh with skin on into small cubes, and nearly cover with water. Boil until soft, then put into jelly bag.
When all the juice is drained out, put on stove and boil ½ hour, then measure and put cup for cup of juice and sugar and boil until thick. Nice with pancakes or toast.
A one-ingredient-plus-sugar syrup that depends entirely on how much you reduce it. The original gives no yield, no finishing temperature and no storage instructions, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: reduce the juice firstBoiling the strained juice a full half hour before any sugar goes in is what concentrates the flavour. Sugar added to thin, watery juice gives a weak syrup that needs much longer boiling to thicken, with more risk of a caramelised flavour taking over.
- Choose the pumpkinA field or jack-o'-lantern pumpkin is watery and mild. A sugar or pie pumpkin, or a butternut or kabocha squash, gives noticeably more flavour per pound. The recipe leaves the skin on; scrub it rather than peel it.
- Jelly bagA jelly bag is a fine cloth bag hung to drip. A colander lined with a double layer of damp muslin or a clean cotton tea towel does the same job. Let it drip on its own rather than squeezing, or the syrup goes cloudy and thick with pulp.
- Cup for cupEqual volumes of juice and granulated sugar. The high proportion of sugar is what helps the syrup keep; cutting it back gives a syrup more likely to ferment.
- Knowing when it is thickThe book gives no temperature, but rather than judging by eye you can use a thermometer: around 220F gives a pourable pancake syrup, and a few degrees higher a distinctly thicker one. It will always look thinner in the pan than it does on a plate.
- StorageThe book gives no canning directions, so treat it as a fresh preserve. Bottle it hot in a clean jar, cool it and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for a month or more. Do not assume a hot fill alone makes it shelf-stable.
- Don't waste the pulpThe drained solids still hold flavour. Push the cooked flesh through a sieve to leave the skin behind and use the purée in a pie or quick bread.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell Five Roses flour, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which is why entries like this one carry the loose, spoken quality of a recipe passed between neighbours. Homemade fruit and vegetable syrups belong to a period when sweetening was a genuine household expense and anything sugary that could be extracted from the garden was worth the fuel to boil it down: maple and corn syrup were the commercial standards, but pumpkin, watermelon and cornstalk syrups all appear in North American manuscript and community cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.