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Blackberry Syrup
Mrs. Bausher.
To one pint of juice, put one pound of white sugar, one-half ounce of powdered cinnamon, one-fourth ounce mace, and two teaspoons cloves; boil all together for quarter of an hour, then strain the syrup, and add to each pint a glass of French brandy.
A spiced blackberry cordial of the sort nineteenth-century households kept as much for the medicine shelf as the table. It is straightforward, but the spice handling and the brandy measure both need translating.
- Getting the juiceThe recipe assumes you start with strained juice. Reckon on roughly 2 lb of ripe blackberries, crushed and warmed gently until they collapse, then pressed through a jelly bag, to yield about a pint. Do not boil the fruit hard at this stage or the juice turns muddy.
- Use whole spices, not powderedPowdered cinnamon and mace will not strain out of a syrup; they leave it gritty and cloudy. A 2-inch cinnamon stick, a blade or two of mace and the cloves lightly bruised give the same flavour and lift out cleanly. If you keep to the powders, strain twice through damp muslin.
- MaceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold as dried blades or ground. A quarter ounce is a good handful of blades; blade mace is very light, so weigh it rather than trusting a spoon measure. It is warmer and lighter than nutmeg, and dominates quickly.
- "A glass" of brandyA wine glass in period cookbooks is usually taken as about 2 fl oz, though the term was never fixed. Two ounces per pint works out at roughly 4 to 5 percent alcohol in the finished syrup; go higher only if you want it to keep longer.
- The quarter-hour boilFifteen minutes at a steady simmer is enough to dissolve the sugar and reduce slightly, but a hard rolling boil can start to push it toward jelly, as blackberries carry some pectin, though they are not among the high-pectin fruits. Keep it just below a full boil and skim the foam.
- Add the brandy off the heatStir the brandy in once the strained syrup has cooled to warm. Added to boiling syrup, a good deal of the alcohol and much of the aroma will be lost.
- Yield and keepingOne pint of juice with a pound of sugar makes appreciably more than a pint of finished syrup; reckon on something nearer a pint and a half. Bottle it in sterilised bottles and keep it refrigerated; the sugar and spirit slow spoilage but this is not a shelf-stable preserve by modern standards. Use within a couple of months.
- ServingA tablespoon or two in a glass of cold or sparkling water, over ice cream, or stirred into a whiskey sour in place of simple syrup.
Blackberry syrups, cordials and brandies were fixtures of the nineteenth-century American household, and they sat squarely on the line between confection and medicine. Blackberry root and fruit had a long-standing reputation as a remedy for summer complaint and dysentery, and the addition of astringent spices and brandy is the signature of a domestic remedy rather than a dessert sauce: cinnamon, mace and cloves were all held to settle the stomach. Recipes of this kind appear in community cookbooks throughout the period, commonly credited by name to the woman who contributed them, as here to Mrs. Bausher. Whether the syrup ever cured anything is doubtful, but a spoonful of sugared blackberry and brandy would have been welcome enough on its own terms.