Plain Syrup
To six pounds of sugar add one half gallon of water. Stir until sugar is dissolved and bring to boiling point. Strain through a flannel bag, and bottle for use.
Cherry Syrup No. 1 Put cherries into a wooden bowl and pound with potato masher to break the stones, then strain through a jelly bag. To each quart of juice add one pound of sugar. Stir until sugar is dissolved, then boil five minutes. Cool, and bottle.
Cherry Syrup No. 2 Soak eight ounces of wild cherry bark in one quart of cold distilled water for forty-eight hours. Strain, and add one pound of granulated sugar. Stir until sugar is dissolved and bottle.
Three formulas run together here: a straightforward bar syrup, and two cherry syrups that a modern kitchen should leave alone. The notes below cover the mechanics of the plain syrup and explain why the other two fail.
- The plain syrup ratioSix pounds of sugar to half a gallon of water is about 1.5 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight — heavier than the 1:1 simple syrup most bar books call for, and typical of soda-fountain practice where the syrup was cut with carbonated water at the tap. It yields somewhere near a gallon of finished syrup.
- Bring to boiling point, and no furtherThe instruction is to reach a boil, not to hold one. Prolonged boiling drives off water and concentrates the syrup further than intended; pull it as soon as it breaks.
- The flannel bagStraining through flannel was the standard way to catch cane-sugar impurities and give a clear syrup for glassware. Unbleached muslin, a jelly bag or a coffee filter does the same job; strain while hot, or it will pass very slowly.
- "Bottle for use" is not preservationA heavy sugar syrup resists spoilage but is not sterile. Refrigerate it, and discard it if mould appears on the surface.
- Cherry Syrup No. 1 — the stones are the problemPounding the fruit to break the stones is deliberate: cracked cherry pits give the almond-like noyau note. Those kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the crushed tissue meets water, and the five-minute boil here comes after the juice has already sat with the broken stones. There is no way to know the dose in a batch made this way.
- Cherry Syrup No. 2 — a drug preparation, not a flavouringWild cherry bark (Prunus serotina) contains prunasin, another cyanogenic glycoside. A long cold maceration is the method by which the old pharmacopoeial syrup developed its hydrocyanic acid, and that syrup was dispensed by the spoonful as a cough sedative. Eight ounces of bark to a quart, drunk as a soda syrup, is not a food quantity.
- If you want cherry syrupUse a current recipe built on pitted fruit. Nothing on this page should be adapted to get there.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of nonalcoholic drink books that appeared as Prohibition closed the saloons; the title is the period slang for going dry. The syrups section is the working heart of such a book, since plain syrup was the base every other drink was sweetened from. The two cherry formulas show how thin the line was between the drink book and the pharmacy: No. 1 is a fruit syrup made the confectioner's way, with the stones cracked for their bitter-almond perfume, while No. 2 is essentially the officinal syrup of wild cherry bark, a cough preparation listed in nineteenth-century pharmacopoeias. Both rest on cyanogenic chemistry that the trade of the day understood only as a matter of flavour and dose.