Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Cream Nectar
Cream Nectar
Mrs. John Morse.
Four pounds of white sugar, six quarts of water, put over a slow fire, milk warm, add whites of two eggs well beaten; bring the whole to nearly boiling point; let boil and strain immediately; when cold add six ounces of tartaric acid; flavour with lemon; a wineglass to be used in a tumbler of water; add half a teaspoonful of baking soda.
This is a soda-fountain syrup, not a drink in itself: you make a large batch of acidulated sugar syrup, then fizz it a glass at a time with baking soda. A few of the terms need translating before it makes sense.
- "Milk warm"Blood heat, roughly 98-100F. The point is to add the beaten whites to a syrup warm enough to dissolve the sugar but cool enough that the egg does not seize instantly, so it can spread through and gather scum as it sets.
- What the eggs are forThey are a clarifying raft, not an ingredient. As the syrup heats, the coagulating albumen traps sediment and rises; straining immediately, while everything is hot and fluid, is the whole trick. Let it cool first and the curd breaks up and clouds the syrup.
- Six ounces of tartaric acidWeight, not volume, and it is a large amount by design: this is the acid half of a two-part fizz. Add it only when the syrup is fully cold, since acid plus prolonged heat inverts the sugar and can make the syrup thin and sticky.
- Wineglass and tumblerA Victorian wineglass measure is about 2 fluid ounces; a tumbler is 8 to 10 ounces. So the working ratio is roughly one part syrup to four or five parts water.
- The soda goes in lastHalf a teaspoon of baking soda stirred into the filled glass reacts with the tartaric acid to make the carbon dioxide. Add it at the table and drink at once; done in the jug, the fizz is gone before it reaches anyone.
- YieldSix quarts of water and four pounds of sugar give a little over seven quarts of syrup, which at a wineglass a glass is upwards of a hundred servings. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible for a modern household.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative here beyond sugar and acid, and the syrup is dilute by modern standards. Refrigerate it in clean bottles and use it within a few weeks, or freeze in portions; discard at any sign of cloudiness, film or fermentation.
- Flavouring with lemonThe original leaves both the form and the quantity open. Lemon extract or essence is the likelier reading than juice, which would add its own sugar and pulp; if using extract, start with a teaspoon or two for the full batch and taste.
Before bottled soft drinks were cheap and universal, a household that wanted a fizzy drink made one on the spot from two halves that met in the glass: an acid syrup and a spoonful of bicarbonate. Recipes of this type fill nineteenth-century collections under names like nectar, effervescing syrup and cream soda, and tartaric acid was an ordinary chemist's-shop purchase, sold alongside cream of tartar and carbonate of soda for exactly this kind of domestic chemistry. Its appearance in The Home Cook Book - a Toronto charity compilation of the 1870s built from contributions credited by name, here to Mrs. John Morse - is typical of the genre: made in quantity, so that a large jug of syrup and a box of soda could serve a crowd.