Home › At the Fountain › Hickory-Nut or Walnut-Cream Syrup
Hickory-Nut or Walnut-Cream Syrup
Take one pound of hickory-nut or walnut kernels, and remove the skin by blanching, which, if left on, would give an unpleasant, bitter taste; then powder in a wedgewood or porcelain mortar, adding a few drops of lemon juice to prevent the separation of oil in kernels; also water, gradually added to make a thick emulsion. As fast as the kernels are reduced, put them in a linen cloth, which should be gathered around them so that they may be squeezed through the cloth. Whatever is left in the cloth should be returned to the mortar, and pulverized further, the lemon juice and water being added as needed. All should eventually pass through the strainer. The result of this process (about two pints) is to be added to two quarts of cream syrup. This formula may be varied, and perhaps improved, by a slight addition of extract of lemon or vanilla, or any other flavor to suit the taste; likewise a little coloring to suit the fancy. It will repay the labor of preparing it.
A pharmacist's nut emulsion, essentially an orgeat made with American nuts, folded into a sweet cream base for the soda fountain. A blender and a nut-milk bag do in ten minutes what the mortar and linen cloth did in an hour.
- The hinge: get the skins offWalnut pellicle is where the tannin and bitterness live, and it will dominate the finished syrup. Pour boiling water over shelled walnuts, let stand a few minutes, then rub in a towel and pick over; expect to lose some patience and some nutmeat. The recipe asks the same of hickory kernels, though their skins are thinner and come away more easily.
- Why the lemon juiceGround nuts want to break and weep oil rather than form a smooth emulsion. The recipe credits the acid, along with water added gradually, with holding it together. Add water a spoonful at a time and keep the paste thick until the last stage.
- Mortar and clothA high-speed blender with a pound of kernels and water added in stages gets you there; strain through a nut-milk bag or two layers of butter muslin, twisting hard. The instruction to return the solids and grind again is worth following, since it recovers a useful part of the yield.
- Use a non-reactive vesselThe Wedgwood or porcelain mortar is specified for a reason. Nut tannins and lemon juice pick up metallic flavours from unlined iron or copper; glass, ceramic or stainless steel throughout.
- Cream syrupIn fountain practice this is a heavy simple syrup enriched with cream or condensed milk, not a syrup for cream soda flavour. Look up the book's own cream-syrup formula and make that first; the proportions here assume a syrup already at fountain sweetness.
- Yield and dosingTwo pints of emulsion into two quarts of syrup gives about three quarts of finished syrup. At the fountain that is 1 to 1.5 fl oz per glass topped with carbonated water, so something on the order of sixty-five to ninety-five drinks.
- Keeping itThis is a dairy syrup carrying fresh nut oil, and neither is shelf-stable. Refrigerate and use within three or four days; nut emulsions go rancid faster than most people expect, and the syrup will separate on standing and need a shake.
- FlavouringA teaspoon of vanilla extract per quart is about enough to round the nut flavour without covering it. The suggested colouring is cosmetic and does nothing for the taste.
Nut emulsions came into the soda fountain from the pharmacy shelf, where almond emulsion — almond kernels ground in a mortar with water — was a standard preparation, closely related to orgeat. American dispensers substituted the nuts they actually had: hickory, black walnut, butternut, later pecan. The soda fountain of the late nineteenth century was often a druggist's counter, and books of this kind were written for men who owned mortars, could read a formula, and were expected to compound their own syrups rather than buy them in. The closing line, that it will repay the labour of preparing it, reads as an acknowledgement that even then this was a great deal of work compared with a bottled extract — and a quiet argument for doing it anyway.