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Raspberry Syrup
Put six pounds of raspberries into an earthenware pan, press them gently, sprinkle with four ounces of crushed loaf sugar, and let them remain for ten or twelve hours. Pass the juice through a very fine sieve, measure it, pour it into a preserving-pan, and boil for twenty minutes skimming frequently. To each breakfast cupful of the juice add four ounces of loaf sugar roughly crushed; boil until the liquor commences to thicken, pour it into an earthenware bowl to cool, and then into bottles. Cork and seal them, and stand them in a dry place until wanted.
A two-stage fruit syrup: a long cold maceration to draw the juice, then a boil with sugar to concentrate it. The proportions here make a fairly light syrup, which affects how it must be stored.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; "roughly crushed" simply meant reduced to workable lumps.
- A breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. That puts the ratio at roughly 4 oz sugar to a cup of juice — about 115 g sugar per 250 ml.
- Earthenware and the preserving-panGlazed earthenware is nonreactive, and acid fruit juice can react with bare iron or tin. Use glass, stainless steel or another nonreactive bowl for the maceration; the "preserving-pan" is any wide, heavy pan that lets liquid evaporate quickly.
- The ten to twelve hour restThis is only a cold sugar extraction, so keep the pan covered and refrigerated rather than leaving it on a kitchen counter overnight. Fruit left at room temperature that long will start to ferment and the syrup will taste of it.
- StrainingA very fine sieve means a sieve lined with damp muslin or a jelly bag. Let it drip rather than pressing the pulp through, or the finished syrup will be cloudy and will throw a sediment in the bottle.
- Judging the thickeningThe second boil is the one that matters. "Commences to thicken" is somewhere near the thread stage on a thermometer, or the point at which the syrup sheets briefly off a spoon; taken much further it can set in the bottle, taken not far enough it stays watery.
- SkimmingThe foam that rises in the first twenty minutes carries froth and fine pulp. Skimming it off is what gives the clear, bright syrup the recipe is aiming at.
- StorageThis is not a shelf-stable preserve by current standards, whatever the corking and sealing implies. Bottle it hot into sterilised bottles, then refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or freeze it in portions.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his cook book in 1896, and fruit syrups like this one belonged to a working hotel kitchen in a way they no longer do to a home one. Bottled raspberry syrup was the base for soda-fountain drinks, for raspberry vinegar and shrub, and for ices; a hotel might plausibly have kept it on hand and made it when the summer fruit was plentiful, though that is supposition rather than documented practice. The technique of macerating fruit with a little sugar overnight before straining is much older than the book and appears throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English confectionery manuals, where the point of the cold rest was to draw juice without cooking away the fresh raspberry aroma. Raspberries are soft enough to give up their juice under light pressure alone.