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How to Make Syrup for Cordials
dered perfectly fine by filtering or fining. Some spirits, as anise seed, etc., frequently require this treatment, which is best performed by running them through a fine and clean filter, having previously mixed them with a spoonful or two of magnesia. By good management, cordials thus made will be perfectly "clear" and transparent; but should not this be the case, they may be fined witli the white of about 12 or 20 eggs to the hogshead, or by adding a little alum, either alone, or followed by a little carbonate of soda or potassa, both dissolved in water. In a week or fortnight the liquor will be clear. For many excellent hints on the manufacture of cordials we refer our readers to the article headed "Infusion, Maceration and Digestion." (See also Appendix.) To Clarify Loaf-Sugar and make Syrup for Cordials.
Take a copper boiler or pan, and put into it your sugar, broken in small pieces. The pan should be sufficiently large to allow the scum to rise a little without boiling over. One pint of water to every two pounds of sugar may be added, this proportion will make a fine syrup, about 32 degrees, Baumé, but the manufacturer often requires weaker syrups when preparing inferior cordials, and the easiest method of ascertaining the proper point of concentration is by the use of that variety of Baumé's hydrometer, called a saccharometer. (This instrument is mentioned under the head of "The Hydrometer.") Beat up the whites of two eggs (if you are clarifying about ten pounds of sugar, or mix in this proportion), until it is very frothy, and then mix in with the rest. Now place the boiler on the fire, and have ready some cold water. When the mixture begins to
This is a sugar-boiler's working note rather than a domestic recipe, and the page breaks off mid-sentence at "When the mixture begins to" — the finishing steps (throwing in a little cold water to check the boil, skimming the raft, straining) are missing. What survives is still useful, but read it as a description of a process, not a set of instructions to follow to the end.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard cone that had to be broken up with nippers, and even refined loaf carried enough impurity to need clarifying. Modern granulated or caster sugar is already pure; dissolve it and you are done. The egg-white clarification here is solving a problem that no longer exists.
- The proportionOne pint of water to two pounds of sugar is roughly 475 ml to 900 g — a heavy syrup, close to what a bar would call rich simple syrup. The recipe gives no finished yield.
- 32 degrees BaumeBaume is a density scale read with a hydrometer; 32 Be at room temperature corresponds to about 60 percent sugar by weight, roughly 1.28 specific gravity. A cheap brewing or confectionery hydrometer reads the same thing, and a refractometer is quicker.
- SaccharometerThe "variety of Baume's hydrometer" named here is simply one graduated for sugar solutions. Nothing about it is proprietary or lost; any sugar-scale hydrometer will do the same job.
- Copper boilerUnlined copper was standard for sugar work because it conducts heat evenly, and neutral sugar syrup does not attack it appreciably. A heavy stainless pan behaves the same for this purpose. Keep the pan well oversized, as the author says, because the egg scum climbs.
- Egg-white raftTwo whites to ten pounds of sugar, beaten frothy and stirred in cold, coagulate as the syrup heats and carry fine sediment to the surface as a scum to be lifted off. The whites must go in before any heat, or they set in strings instead of forming a raft.
- Magnesia and alumThe fining agents in the opening paragraph belong to nineteenth-century trade practice. Magnesia (magnesium oxide, or the carbonate sold under the same name) was used as a filter aid for cloudy anise spirits; alum followed by carbonate of soda or potassa was a crude flocculant. Neither is worth using now — a coffee filter, a paper filter pad, or a few days of cold settling will clear a home infusion.
- HogsheadThe reference to twelve or twenty eggs "to the hogshead" is a commercial scale: a hogshead here means roughly 60 to 65 gallons. It gives a sense of who this book was written for.
This comes out of the nineteenth-century trade literature of liqueur manufacture, where a cordial was built from three parts — a rectified spirit, a flavour extracted by infusion or maceration, and a clarified sugar syrup — and each was made to a measured density before blending. The Baume scale, devised by the French pharmacist Antoine Baume in the eighteenth century, was the standard language of that trade well into the twentieth, which is why the author reaches for a saccharometer rather than a recipe proportion. Clarifying sugar with beaten egg white is far older than the book and older than liqueurs; confectioners and apothecaries used the same raft technique for medicinal syrups and preserves, and it survives today mainly in consomme. That a manual aimed at manufacturers had to explain the step at all is a reminder of how variable commercial sugar still was: refining had improved enormously by the middle of the century, but a boiler of loaf sugar could still throw a scum worth lifting off.