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Pomegranate Syrup
Press and strain from seeds and cook down juice till thick, when add sugar (see Fruit Syrup: Introductory Recipes). The uncooked juice is considered very cooling in fevers and the syrup makes a delicious drink.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have already read the book's fruit syrup instructions, where the sugar proportion actually lives. Everything hinges on how far you reduce the juice before the sugar goes in.
- The missing measurementNo sugar quantity is given here because the book's introductory fruit syrup recipe supplies it. Without that cross-reference the amount is genuinely ambiguous, so work to taste and to the consistency you want rather than guessing a number.
- Getting the juice outHalve the fruit, break the arils free of the pale membrane, and press them through a sieve or pulse briefly in a blender and strain. Do not crush the seeds hard or grind the membrane in, both are bitter and tannic.
- YieldThree large pomegranates give roughly 1 to 1½ cups juice, which cooks down to a modest quantity of finished syrup. Plan on six to eight fruit for a useful jar.
- How far to cook downReduce over medium heat until the juice coats a spoon and has lost about half to two thirds of its volume. Pomegranate juice scorches once it thickens, so drop the heat as it darkens and stir; a burnt batch cannot be rescued.
- Sugar goes in last, and for a reasonAdding sugar before reduction risks caramel flavours and scorching over a long boil. Stir it into the hot concentrate off the boil, then return briefly to dissolve fully.
- StorageThe recipe gives no keeping instructions and no sterilising method. Bottle it, refrigerate it, and use within a month or two; the high acidity helps but this is not a canning recipe.
- The medical claimThe line about uncooked juice being "very cooling in fevers" is period humoral thinking, not medicine. Treat it as flavour history.
- Using itTwo tablespoons in a tall glass of cold soda water makes the drink the author means. It is also the same syrup used in grenadine cocktails and, unsweetened and reduced further, close to Middle Eastern pomegranate molasses for dressings and glazes.
Pomegranates travelled with irrigation and empire long before they travelled with cookbooks: native to Persia and the surrounding highlands, cultivated across the Mediterranean and the Middle East for millennia, and carried to the Americas by Spanish missionaries, which is how they came to be an established dooryard fruit in California, Florida and the Gulf South by the time American fruit-preserving books like this one were compiled. The sweetened, reduced juice is a long-established use of the fruit; the French grenadine takes its name from grenade, the pomegranate, and Levantine kitchens reduce the same juice without sugar into the sour syrup now sold as pomegranate molasses. The claim that the fresh juice is "cooling in fevers" places this entry in a long line of household books that made no firm distinction between the pantry and the medicine shelf, where a tart fruit drink might be offered for sickroom thirst.