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Orange Syrup
To each pint of sweet, strained, orange juice add one pound of sugar and a little of the grated peel. The peel and juice of one lemon may also be added if desired, to give piquancy. Boil for fifteen minutes, skimming carefully as scum rises, and straining when ready to remove. Bottle and seal tight. This will keep a long time and is excellent for use in sweet sauces or cold drinks.
CREAM OF ORANGE (Old Recipe) Chop fine two dozen oranges, peel and all, then add three quarts spirits of wine; one-fourth ounce tincture of saffron, one gill orange-flower-water and six pounds of loaf sugar. Let stand one month, when filter and bottle.
Two recipes share this page. The orange syrup is straightforward preserving work; the "Cream of Orange" that follows it cannot be made as written, and the caution above refers to that second formula.
- Spirits of wine is the problem"Spirits of wine" historically meant rectified ethanol, roughly 95 percent, supplied by chemists. What is now sold as methylated or denatured spirit contains methanol or other denaturants and is poisonous; ingesting it can cause blindness or death, and it cannot safely be made drinkable at home.
- Tincture of saffronA tincture is a drug-strength alcoholic extract, and the quarter ounce here is a pharmacy measure, not a kitchen one. Saffron colouring in a modern liqueur is done with a pinch of threads; use a current recipe for an orange liqueur rather than adapting this one.
- Ratio for the syrupOne pound of sugar to one pint of juice is about 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups juice. That is a heavy syrup by design; it is the sugar concentration, not the sealing, that keeps it.
- Strained juice mattersPulp and membrane are what cloud the syrup and what throws most of the scum you are told to skim. Strain the juice through a fine sieve or muslin before the sugar goes in and there will be very little to remove.
- Fifteen minutes, and what it gives youA pint of juice with a pound of sugar boiled for a quarter hour gives a pourable syrup. Boiled longer it stiffens toward a jelly, and what pectin the grated peel carries works in that direction too.
- Peel and bitternessGrate only the coloured zest. Any white pith carried in will turn the syrup bitter over the weeks it sits. The lemon the recipe offers for piquancy brings acid as well as flavour, and the acid also helps keep the syrup from crystallising.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Bottle hot into clean bottles, but treat "keeps a long time" as meaning refrigerated and used within a few months; a hot-filled bottle is not a processed seal.
- A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup, in American usage; an imperial gill is five fluid ounces. Worth knowing for other recipes in this section even though the measure appears here in the formula that should not be made.
Orange syrup belongs to a family of fruit syrups that were often made at home as an alternative to the soda fountain: a concentrated sweetened juice kept in the cupboard and let down with cold water, soda water, or spooned over puddings, which is exactly the use this book names. The second recipe is a different kind of survival "cream" liqueur of the sort that filled eighteenth- and nineteenth-century receipt books, where whole fruit was steeped in strong spirit with sugar and an aromatic such as orange-flower water, then filtered clear after a month. The compiler's label "Old Recipe" may suggest that such formulas were by then regarded as inheritances from earlier practice, at a period when the line between the kitchen and the apothecary's shelf — tinctures, spirits of wine, flower waters — was arguably still blurred.