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Strawberry Water
Wash and mash a quart of ripe strawberries. Cover with one pound of sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and set aside for three or four hours. Strain through a jelly bag and add one pint of cold water. Serve with cracked ice and Vichy.
A cold-process strawberry syrup, diluted and finished with sparkling water. Nothing is cooked, so the fruit's flavour stays bright but the keeping time is short.
- The quantitiesA quart of strawberries is somewhere around 1.3 to 1.5 lb, or roughly 4 cups hulled. One pound of sugar is a little over 2 cups granulated. That is a heavy proportion by modern taste; two-thirds of it still draws the juice out and gives a syrup you can dilute further.
- Maceration is the whole methodThe three or four hours of standing is what does the work: the sugar pulls juice from the crushed berries by osmosis and dissolves into it. Stir once or twice more during the rest, and keep it covered in the refrigerator rather than on the counter.
- VichyVichy water is a naturally carbonated, mineral-rich French water, sold widely in bottles when this book was written. Any plain sparkling water or club soda serves; the slight salinity of a mineral water is closer to the original.
- Jelly bagA double layer of damp cheesecloth in a sieve, or a fine nylon straining bag, does the same job. Let it drip rather than squeezing if you want a clear drink; squeeze if you would rather have the yield and do not mind cloudiness.
- Don't waste the pulpWhat stays in the bag is sweetened strawberry pulp. It is good stirred into yoghurt or spooned over cake, and there is a fair amount of it.
- Yield and servingYou will end up with roughly a quart of sweetened base after the pint of water goes in. Figure about 2 oz of base per glass topped with sparkling water, which gives twelve to sixteen drinks; more if you serve it very light.
- KeepingUncooked fruit syrup, even at this sugar level, will ferment or mould within about a week in the refrigerator. Freeze it in portions if you want it to last the season.
- RaspberriesRaspberries behave the same way with sugar. They give more seeds and a thinner juice, so strain twice.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of American drink books written for households that had, by choice or by law, given up alcohol; the title plays on "on the water wagon," the slang for abstaining that is generally taken as the source of "off the wagon." Books of this kind leaned hard on fruit syrups, shrubs and mineral waters, and a bottled sparkling water was one of the few things that could make a nonalcoholic drink feel like it belonged at a table. Vichy carried associations of the European spa and of medical respectability, which may be part of why it is named specifically in period recipes rather than simply "soda water." The cold-sugar maceration used here is older than the book, being a common domestic way to capture soft-fruit juice before refrigeration or commercial bottling, and it survives in the raspberry and strawberry shrubs still made today.