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Strawberry Acid
Put twelve pounds fruit in a pan. Cover it with two quarts water, having previously acidulated the water with five ounces tartaric acid. Let it remain forty-eight hours. Then strain, taking care not to bruise the fruit. To each pint of juice add one pound and a half powdered sugar. Stir till dissolved, and leave a few days. Then bottle and cork lightly. If a slight fermentation takes place, leave the corks out for a few days. The whole process to be cold. When put away, the bottles must be kept erect.--Mrs. Col. R.
A cold-process strawberry cordial base: the acid draws juice from the fruit without heat, and the sugar does the preserving. Nothing here is cooked, so the syrup keeps its fresh colour and flavour but is more perishable than a boiled one.
- Scale it downTwelve pounds of strawberries and two quarts of water is a stillroom quantity. A tenth of the recipe works cleanly: about 1 lb 4 oz fruit, a scant 3/4 cup water, 1/2 oz (about 4 teaspoons) tartaric acid.
- Tartaric acidSold as a food-grade powder for winemaking and confectionery; cream of tartar is not a substitute, being potassium bitartrate. Five ounces to two quarts is a genuinely sharp solution, roughly 7 percent, which is what pulls the juice out and keeps the finished syrup stable.
- The hinge: do not bruise the fruitStrain by letting the macerated berries drip through a jelly bag or double muslin without pressing. Crushed pulp clouds the syrup and carries pectin and cell debris that make it cloudy and prone to fermenting.
- Sugar ratioA pound and a half of sugar to a pint of juice is about 3 1/3 cups sugar to 2 cups liquid. It dissolves reluctantly in cold juice; stir at intervals over several hours rather than expecting it to go at once, and keep stirring until no grit is left at the bottom.
- Weigh, don't assumeMeasure by juice volume as written, since yield varies with the fruit. How much juice twelve pounds of berries plus two quarts of water will give depends entirely on how freely they drip, so the finished quantity cannot be predicted in advance -- work from the juice you actually get.
- "Cork lightly" means what it saysThe residual yeasts on the fruit are still live, since no stage is heated. A tight cork or a screw cap on a fermenting bottle builds pressure. Cover loosely until the syrup has gone quiet, then seal.
- Keeping itStore cold and upright, as the recipe insists; sediment settles and the cork stays dry. Even at this sugar and acid level, a refrigerator is the honest modern answer, and any bottle that turns fizzy, hazy or winey should be discarded.
- How it was drunkServing -- About one part syrup to six or eight parts iced water or soda gives a strawberry shrub. Modern uses: it also does well over ice cream or stirred into sparkling wine.
"Acids" of this kind — raspberry acid, strawberry acid, lemon acid — were a summer drink of the American and British household, and *Housekeeping in Old Virginia* (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by women of Virginia and her sister states, gives several. Tartaric acid, isolated from grape lees and cheap by the mid-nineteenth century, let a cook extract juice cold and preserve it without the long boiling that dulls the flavour of soft fruit; the result was a concentrate to be diluted at the table, in the same family as the older vinegar-based shrubs and the fruit vinegars still made in England. The attribution "Mrs. Col. R." is typical of the book, which credits its recipes to named-but-abbreviated contributors and so reads as a record of what a particular circle of postwar households put up.