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Lemon Syrup
(Sciroppo di limone) Three big lemons.
One and a half pound of sugar.
A tumbler of water.
Skin the lemons, removing the internal pulp without squeezing it and taking off all seeds.
Put the water on the fire with the skin of one of the lemons cut in a thin ribbon like strip with a small knife. When the water is near boiling put in the sugar then remove the lemon skin and immerse the pulp of the three lemons. Boil until the syrup is condensed and cooked right, which is known by the pearls that it makes boiling and the color of white wine that is acquires. Preserve in a bottle, and when needed, dilute in a tumbler of ice water. A small quantity will make a delightful beverage.
A lemon cordial concentrate, cooked to a set sugar density so it keeps. The whole recipe turns on how far you boil it.
- The measurementsA tumbler is an ordinary drinking glass, about 8 fl oz / 1 cup. One and a half pounds of sugar is roughly 3 1/3 cups. Three big lemons will give you around 1/2 to 2/3 cup of juice and pulp.
- "Pearls" and white wine colourThis is the hinge. The pearl stage in old sugar work is a syrup boiling in small round beads that cling briefly to the spoon; modern tables usually place it somewhere around 220F, though the book gives no temperature and expects the cook to judge by eye. Boil well past it and the syrup may crystallize in the bottle; short of it, it is too thin to keep.
- Why the peel comes outOne strip of zest goes in only to perfume the water, then is lifted before the long boil. Left in, the pith turns the syrup bitter. Take the strip with a peeler or small knife and avoid the white layer entirely.
- Removing the pulp without squeezingThe intent is to keep the segments intact so no bitter membrane juice or seed oil gets in. Peel the lemons, pull the segments apart, flick out the seeds, and drop the flesh in whole.
- Strain before bottlingThe book does not say so, but the cooked pulp leaves shreds of membrane behind. Pour the finished syrup through a fine sieve while hot into a clean, warm bottle, or the sediment will cloud every glass.
- Do not let it colourCook over moderate heat and do not stir once the sugar has dissolved. If the syrup goes amber it has begun to caramelize and the lemon flavour flattens.
- Yield and keepingAbout 2 cups of syrup, enough for 15-20 glasses at a couple of tablespoons each. It was meant for a cool larder; refrigerate it and use within a month or two, and discard it if it ferments or grows a film.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was aimed at American cooks, and its syrup recipes reflect an Italian domestic habit that predates bottled soft drinks: a household kept concentrated fruit sciroppi on hand and diluted them to order, exactly as this recipe instructs at the end. Lemons were the obvious candidate, being cheap and abundant in the Italian south. The vocabulary here belongs to the older confectioner's craft rather than to modern cooking: judging a syrup by the "pearls" it makes and by its colour was standard practice before household thermometers, and the same scale of terms, from thread through pearl to crack, runs through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sugar work across Europe. That the book expects a cook to recognize the pearl stage on sight says a good deal about what was assumed of a competent kitchen in 1919.