Grape Syrup
Make according to the recipe for currant syrup.
Strawberry Syrup No. 1 Dissolve two pounds of sugar in one pint of water in a porcelain kettle. Boil and skim until clear. Mash ripe strawberries and strain through a jelly bag. Put the syrup over the fire again, and boil rapidly until a ball is formed in cold water, then add two pints and a half of the strawberry juice. Let it once more come to a boil, skim, and seal in sterilized jars. Strawberry Syrup No. 2 Mix one half ounce of tartaric acid, one half ounce of essence of strawberry, and two quarts of plain syrup. Color with tincture of solferino. Stir well together and bottle.
Pineapple Syrup No. 1 Add gradually to the beaten white of one egg a pint of cold water. Put this with three pounds of granulated sugar in a porcelain kettle, boil, and skim until clear. Cool. Grate enough pineapples to make three quarts of juice. Strain carefully. Boil the sugar syrup again for ten minutes, and add slowly the pineapple juice. Let it come to a boil, skim, and when thoroughly cold, bottle, cork, and seal with paraffin or sealing wax. Pineapple Syrup No. 2 One half ounce essence of pineapple, one fourth ounce tartaric acid, and two quarts of plain syrup. Mix well and bottle.
Two of the four formulas here are genuine fruit syrups; the other two are soda-fountain shortcuts built on flavouring essences and a coal-tar dye, and one of those cannot be made in a kitchen today. The notes below cover the vocabulary and the technique, not a rewrite.
- Tincture of solferinoSolferino is a nineteenth-century name for fuchsine (magenta), an aniline dye from the coal-tar trade, sold to confectioners and druggists for colouring. It was withdrawn from food use as synthetic colours came under regulation, and older commercial batches were also liable to arsenic contamination from manufacture. There is no modern equivalent to substitute in the sense the book means it.
- Sealing and keeping"Seal in sterilized jars" and "cork, and seal with paraffin or sealing wax" were the standard shelf-storage methods of the period. Neither is a heat process, and paraffin caps in particular were abandoned because they shrink and admit mould. For a syrup meant to sit in a cupboard, use a current tested canning recipe with stated processing times.
- The cross-referenceThe grape syrup that gives this page its title has no method of its own; it points back to the currant syrup recipe elsewhere in the book. Read that first, or the page is only strawberry and pineapple.
- "Until a ball is formed in cold water"This is the old drop test for sugar concentration, and "a ball" without further qualification generally means the soft-ball to firm-ball range, roughly 235-245F. The point is to concentrate the sugar before the fruit juice thins it, so the finished syrup pours thick rather than watery.
- "Plain syrup"Simple syrup: sugar dissolved in water and boiled clear. The syrups on this page run heavy -- two pounds of sugar to a pint of water in the strawberry recipe, three pounds to a pint in the pineapple -- much denser than the equal-weights simple syrup now standard behind a bar.
- Egg white as a clarifierThe white beaten into cold water in Pineapple Syrup No. 1 is a fining agent, not an ingredient. Its coagulating protein traps scum and fine particles so they can be skimmed off, and the whole of it is meant to come out with the skimmings.
- Quantities are fountain-scaleThree quarts of grated pineapple juice and two and a half pints of strained strawberry juice both call for a great deal of fruit, several pounds of berries and pineapples by the half-dozen or more. These are formulas for a shop counter or a summer's worth of cordials, not a single pitcher.
- Essences and tartaric acid"Essence of strawberry" and "essence of pineapple" were druggists' flavouring alcohols, far stronger than modern supermarket extracts and not interchangeable by volume. The tartaric acid supplies the sourness that the absent fruit would have given; half an ounce to two quarts is a sharp dose.
Syrup chapters like this one belong to the age of the drugstore soda fountain. Fruit syrups diluted with plain or carbonated water were a common non-alcoholic drink, and household manuals of the period reprinted fountain formulas alongside genuine preserving recipes, which is why two contradictory approaches sit side by side here: one strawberry syrup made from strawberries, another made from acid, essence and dye. Solferino itself was named after the 1859 battle in northern Italy, a fashion in dye naming that followed the discovery of the first bright aniline colours.