No. 3165

To Filter Fruit Juices, to Flavor Syrups with Zest and to Flavor

SUGAR WITH ZEST OR VANILLA (Pour Filter les Sucs de Fruits, Pour Parfumer les Sirops aux Zestes, Pour Parfumer le Sucre aux Zestes et a la Vanille).

To Filter Fruit Juices.—Orange and lemon juices are those most frequently filtered, either through a filtering paper and a glass funnel, or through unsized paper, mashed up, washed and converted into a pulp, then spread in layers on a clean sieve. To filter raspberry and currant juices in large quantities use the felt straining bag, as represented for filtering jellies (Fig. 50).

To Flavor Syrup with Zest.—Infusions are made of lemon, orange, mandarin or Seville orange peel. First peel the fruits with a small kitchen knife, being careful not to cut off any of the white part, as this is always bitter. To flavor a syrup with these peels they need only to be macerated for twenty-five minutes in a little tepid water; add this infusion with the zest to some cold syrup; after remaining in the syrup twenty-five minutes strain through a fine sieve.

To Flavor Sugar with Zest.—To flavor sugar with fruit peels, rub the fruits on a piece of loaf sugar, and at once grate off the colored damp parts of the sugar with a knife; put this on sheets of paper, and set it in the air to dry, then crush with a rolling pin and pass through a fine sieve.

To Flavor Sugar with Vanilla.—Cut the vanilla beans into small pieces, pound them with the loaf sugar, using one pound of sugar for two ounces of vanilla; sift the sugar through a fine sieve and put it away in closed glass jars.

← No. 3164 Snow Eggs Molded Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3166 Flamri of Apples →

For the Modern Kitchen

Four small workshop procedures rather than a dish: clarifying fruit juice, and carrying citrus or vanilla flavor into syrup and into sugar. The hinge in all of them is the same — take only the colored outer layer of the peel, never the white pith beneath it.

Filtering paper, then and now"Filtering paper" is laboratory filter paper; "unsized paper" pulped and spread on a sieve was the improvised version. A paper coffee filter in a cone, or a double layer of rinsed muslin, does the same work. Let it drip rather than pressing it, or the cloudiness you are removing goes straight through.
The felt straining bagThe felt straining bag of Fig. 50 is the jelly bag — a bag of thick flannel or felt, hung so the juice can drip. Modern equivalents are a fine jelly bag or a large sieve lined with damp muslin set over a bowl; wetting the cloth first keeps it from absorbing juice.
Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone or pressed block — the ancestor of the sugar cube. Its point here is a firm dry surface to abrade against the fruit. Rough sugar cubes work; granulated sugar rubbed with the peel and left to dry does the same job less elegantly.
Zest without pithTake the peel with a paring knife held almost flat, or a vegetable peeler, and stop at the first sign of white. Pith is bitter and, unlike zest, its bitterness dissolves readily into syrup.
Seville orange and mandarinSeville (bitter) orange is a winter-only fruit in most markets; its peel is markedly more aromatic and resinous than sweet orange. Mandarin peel here means the loose-skinned tangerine group. Any of these can be substituted for another, but the character of the syrup changes noticeably.
The twenty-five minutesTwo separate steeps of about twenty-five minutes: peel in tepid (not hot) water, then that infusion plus the peel in cold syrup. The recipe specifies tepid rather than hot water and a short steep; it gives no reason and sets no longer limit.
Vanilla sugar proportionsOne pound of sugar to two ounces of vanilla works out at roughly a dozen or more beans per 450 g, depending on bean size — extravagant by current standards, and suited to a kitchen turning out creams daily. A domestic version at one or two split beans per 500 g of sugar, left in a sealed jar for a week or two, is the usual modern approach.
Drying and storageThe scraped citrus sugar is damp with fruit oil and will cake; spread it thin and let it dry in air before crushing and sieving, as the recipe directs. Both sugars keep in sealed glass jars, though the citrus one will lose its aroma over time.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years at Delmonico's, and pages like this one are the reason it reads as a professional manual rather than a household book: before commercial extracts and bottled flavorings were reliable, a large kitchen made its own aromatics from scratch and stored them. Rubbing a sugar loaf against citrus peel to capture the oil is a long-standing French confectioner's trick; abrading the peel against a hard crystal surface releases the oil directly into the sugar. The insistence on filtered juice belongs to the same period's aesthetic: cold entremets were judged partly on clarity, and a jelly or sorbet with a cloudy base was a visible fault. The vanilla proportion — two ounces of bean to the pound — is generous, and pounding the whole bean into the sugar wasted none of it.