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Sugar Syrup
½ cup boiling water Boil two minutes, keep in preserve jar, and use when needed.
A bare-bones simple syrup, printed as a component rather than a dish. The line as it stands in the book gives only the water, which tells you something about how these back-of-the-chapter formulas were set in type.
- The missing sugarAs printed here the sugar quantity has dropped out of the line, leaving only the half cup of boiling water. Period sugar syrups of this kind run from equal parts sugar and water to two parts sugar to one of water; without the original figure it cannot be recovered, so treat the proportion as your own choice rather than the book's.
- Equal parts is the safe defaultOne cup sugar dissolved in one cup water gives the all-purpose syrup used for sweetening cold drinks, moistening cake and thinning fondant. A heavier two-to-one syrup is stickier and keeps longer, but it will crystallize more readily on standing.
- Two minutes is a dissolving boil, not a candy stageThe point is to clear the syrup and drive off nothing more. Boil it long enough and you are on the road to thread, soft ball and the rest of the sugar-cookery ladder, at which point it is no longer pourable syrup.
- Guard against crystallizationStir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone, and wash any grains from the side of the pan with a wet brush. Stray crystals matter more the heavier the syrup; a thin syrup is fairly forgiving, a two-to-one one much less so.
- The preserve jarA glass canning jar with a lid, not a sealed and processed preserve. Pour the syrup in hot, cool it, and refrigerate; a thin syrup will spoil or mould at room temperature before long, and keeps appreciably better chilled.
- YieldEqual parts sugar and water at this scale gives roughly three-quarters of a cup of syrup, enough for a few rounds of sweetened drinks or one batch of chafing-dish sauce.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which explains the book's long attention to confectionery, frostings and sweet sauces. Stock syrup like this one is a confectioner's habit carried into the domestic kitchen: professional candy makers and soda fountains kept dissolved sugar on hand because granulated sugar does not dissolve readily into cold liquids. The chafing dish was popular in American entertaining in this period, and cookbooks of the time often gave it a chapter of its own.