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Syrup for Fruit Beverages
3/4 cup sugar 3/4 cup boiling water Add sugar to boiling water, stir until sugar is dissolved, then let boil without stirring 12 minutes. Cool and bottle.
A plain sugar syrup, boiled well past the dissolving point so it keeps and mixes cold. The boiling time is the whole recipe, and it is longer than most modern sugar-syrup instructions.
- What 12 minutes doesEqual volumes of sugar and water boiled hard for 12 minutes lose a good deal of water, and the syrup will likely finish somewhere near the thread stage (in the low 230s F), though the recipe gives no temperature and the result will vary with pan and heat. The result is a heavier syrup than the thin 1:1 simple syrup used in bars today.
- Do not stir after it boilsThis is the hinge. Stirring a boiling sugar solution throws crystals onto the pan sides and seeds the whole batch grainy. If crystals form above the waterline, wipe them down with a wet pastry brush rather than stirring them in.
- Pan sizeUse a heavy saucepan considerably larger than the volume suggests; sugar syrup climbs when it boils and scorches the moment the water is gone. Twelve minutes on a modern high-output burner in a thin pan can take it to caramel.
- YieldPerhaps half a cup of finished syrup, less if your boil was vigorous. Enough to sweeten several glasses of fruit juice or lemonade.
- Bottling and keeping"Cool and bottle" presumes a clean bottle and cool storage. Cool fully before capping so condensation does not dilute the top layer, and keep it in the refrigerator; a heavy syrup resists spoilage but is not sterile, and mold will eventually appear on the surface.
- How it was usedStir into strained fruit juice and cold water to taste rather than sweetening the drink with dry sugar, which never quite dissolves in a cold liquid.
Making a syrup in advance was a practical matter: it kept in a bottle for days, so a fresh glass could be mixed at any hour without lighting the stove or waking the household. The Philathea name points to the Philathea movement, generally described as the young women's counterpart to the Baraca Bible classes that spread through American Baptist and other Protestant churches in the early twentieth century; cookbooks compiled and sold by such classes were a standard way of raising money for a church, though their contents drew freely on circulating and commercial recipes as well as on the contributors' own cooking.