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Blackberry Extract
To five quarts of blackberry juice, add ten pounds of sugar, five ounces powdered cinnamon, and two and one quarter ounces of mace. Stir until sugar is dissolved. Strain through a flannel bag, and bottle for use.
A household fruit syrup of the old sort: no cooking, no alcohol, just juice, sugar and a great deal of spice. Scaling it down and rethinking the spices are the two things worth doing before you start.
- Start with the fruitFive quarts of juice takes roughly 15-20 lb of blackberries, crushed and pressed or hung overnight in a jelly bag. A tenth of the recipe -- 2 cups juice, 1 lb sugar -- is a more realistic batch for a modern kitchen.
- The spice load is very heavyFive ounces of cinnamon and 2 1/4 ounces of mace to five quarts works out to about a tablespoon of ground spice per cup of finished syrup. Even for a medicinal cordial that is assertive; a third of it gives a syrup you would willingly pour over anything.
- Use whole spice if you canPowdered cinnamon and mace will not strain cleanly out of a cold syrup -- they clog the bag and leave grit behind. Steeping bruised cinnamon bark and blades of mace in the warmed juice, then straining, gives the same flavour and a clear result.
- MaceMace is the lacy red aril that wraps the nutmeg seed, warmer and less resinous than the nut itself. Ground mace loses its perfume quickly, so buy it fresh or substitute freshly grated nutmeg at about two-thirds the weight.
- Flannel bagA jelly bag of doubled fine muslin, or a large coffee filter, does the same job. Let it drip; squeezing forces sediment through and clouds the syrup.
- Dissolving cold takes patienceTwo pounds of sugar per quart of cold juice will not dissolve by stirring alone in a few minutes. Warm the juice gently -- not to a boil, which dulls the fresh berry flavour -- and stir until no grain is felt on the bottom of the pan.
- Keeping itAt roughly one pound of sugar per pint of juice this is well short of preserving strength, and nothing here is heated enough to sterilise. Bottled and left in a cupboard it is likely to ferment or grow a surface mould; keep it refrigerated, or freeze it in small containers.
- Using itA tablespoon or two in a glass of cold or soda water makes a fruit cordial. It is also good over ice cream, stirred into yoghurt, or brushed on a plain cake.
Blackberry syrups, cordials and "extracts" were fixtures of the nineteenth-century American still-room, valued less as refreshment than as a domestic remedy -- blackberry root and juice were long-standing folk treatments for summer diarrhoea and "bowel complaint," and the cinnamon and mace here are the astringent, warming spices that traditionally went with that use. Many such recipes finished with brandy, which both preserved the syrup and did much of the supposed medicinal work. This version has none. What survives is the fruit and the spice cabinet -- and, in place of alcohol, a great deal of sugar.