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Cream Nectar (II)
Mrs. Spence.
Dissolve two pounds of crushed sugar in three quarts of water; boil down to two quarts; drop in the white of an egg while boiling; then strain, and put in the tartaric acid; when cold drop in the lemon to your taste; then bottle and cork. Shake two or three times a day.
A soda-fountain syrup rather than a drink in itself: sugar boiled down, clarified with egg white, soured with tartaric acid and flavoured with lemon. Two of the four ingredients are given no quantity at all, so treat the original as a proportion sketch.
- The missing amountsNeither the tartaric acid nor the lemon is measured. Period nectar recipes that do give a figure often fall somewhere in the region of an ounce of tartaric acid per quart of finished syrup, but the range is wide; much more than that is aggressively sour. Add it in stages and taste, since it cannot be taken back out.
- What "lemon" means hereAdded cold, after straining, and "dropped" in, this reads more like lemon extract or oil of lemon than juice. Fresh juice would dilute the syrup and shorten its life.
- Crushed sugarLoaf or cone sugar broken down for measuring. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight, and two pounds is roughly 4 1/2 cups.
- The egg-white clarificationThe white coagulates in the boiling syrup and carries scum and fine particles to the surface, where straining removes it. Add it off a hard rolling boil so it sets in sheets rather than shredding, and strain through muslin. All of it comes out; none is eaten raw.
- Boiling downThree quarts reduced to two is a third of the volume gone, which takes a good while in a wide pan. Mark a skewer at the two-quart level before you start rather than guessing by eye.
- Why the shakingTwo or three shakes a day dissolves any acid or flavouring that has settled and keeps the syrup uniform while it matures. Cork loosely at first: a heavily sugared syrup bottled warm can ferment and build pressure if any wild yeast gets in.
- StorageAcid and a high sugar concentration do most of the preserving, but this is not a canned product. Keep it refrigerated and discard it at the first sign of cloudiness, gas or a yeasty smell.
- ServingA tablespoon or two of syrup in a glass, topped with cold water or soda water. Cream nectars of the period were commonly made to foam with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda stirred in at the last second, which reacts with the tartaric acid. At a tablespoon or two a glass, two quarts of syrup runs to somewhere between sixty and a hundred glasses.
"Nectar" was a common name in nineteenth-century American households for a sweet-sour bottled syrup diluted at the table, alongside the commercial soda fountain that was spreading through drugstores in the same decades. The "cream" has nothing to do with dairy; it is usually explained as a reference to the creamy head thrown up when the tartaric acid in the syrup meets a pinch of bicarbonate of soda in the glass, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. Tartaric acid, a by-product of winemaking, was cheap at any chemist's and gave a sharper, more stable sourness than lemon juice, which was seasonal and expensive inland. The Home Cook Book was assembled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women and sold for charity, which is why this one carries Mrs. Spence's name and her assumption that the reader already knows how much acid to use.