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Royal Strawberry
Dissolve two ounces of citric acid in one quart of cold water, and pour over three pounds of ripe strawberries. Put in a cool place for twenty-four hours. Strain, and pour over three fresh pounds of strawberries and let stand again for twenty-four hours. Strain. Measure, and add equal amount of granulated sugar. Boil for five minutes. Cool and pour into jars, but do not seal tight for three days, then seal securely and keep in a cool place. Royal Raspberry may be made according to this same recipe.
This is a concentrated fruit syrup, not a preserve: the citric acid solution is used twice over to strip flavour and colour from two separate batches of berries, then sweetened and briefly boiled. A few points make the difference between a bright red cordial and a cloudy one.
- The citric acid is the hingeTwo ounces is about 57 g, roughly 1/4 cup of the crystals, dissolved in a quart (4 cups) of water. That is a strong solution by modern standards; it does the work of both preservative and flavour extractant, and it is what keeps the colour from browning during the two-day steep.
- The berries are spent, not wastedBoth lots of fruit come out pale and soft. They are not meant to be eaten as fruit, but the second batch still has body enough for a fool or a cooked purée if you dislike throwing food away.
- Strain, do not pressThe recipe simply says strain. Use a jelly bag or a double layer of muslin and let it drip. Squeezing pushes pulp through and gives a permanently murky syrup.
- "Measure, and add equal amount""Measure" most likely means equal volume rather than equal weight: a cup of syrup to a cup of sugar. The recipe does not state the yield, and some of the quart of acid water stays behind in the fruit, so measure what you actually strain off before adding sugar.
- Five minutes means five minutesThe short boil dissolves the sugar and sets the keeping quality; longer cooking dulls the fresh strawberry note and thickens the syrup.
- The three days unsealedThe recipe gives no reason for leaving the jars loosely covered before sealing; whatever the intention, the interval leaves the syrup open to airborne yeast. Modern practice is to bottle hot, cool, and refrigerate, or to water-bath process the filled bottles by a current tested method rather than relying on the loose-lid interval.
- KeepingRefrigerated, a syrup this acidic and this sweet holds for months. Watch for gas or a fizzing sweetness on the tongue, which means it has begun to ferment.
- ServingThe recipe gives no serving directions. A syrup this sweet and acidic takes heavy dilution, roughly one part syrup to five or six parts cold water or soda water, over ice. It is also good over ice cream or stirred into iced tea.
The technique is an old one: pouring an acidulated liquid over fresh fruit, straining, and pouring it over a second batch is the same double-infusion logic behind vinegar-based shrubs and the sherbet syrups of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with purchased citric acid crystals -- sold by druggists by the turn of the century -- standing in for vinegar or lemon juice. Fruit syrups of this kind were a staple of the American non-alcoholic beverage collections published in the early twentieth century.