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Raspberry Syrup
(Sciroppo di lampone) This is prepared like the other explained above but, since this fruit contains less gluten than the gooseberry the period of fermentation will be briefer. The large quantity of sugar used in these syrups is necessary for their conservation and the citric acid is used to correct the excessive sweetness. 211
A cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have just read the preceding syrup, and only flags what changes when the fruit is raspberry. A few of its terms need translating before it makes sense.
- "Gluten" means pectin"Gluten" here almost certainly means pectin -- cookery writers of this period used the word loosely for the gelling, body-giving substance in fruit. Raspberries are lower in pectin than gooseberries or currants, which appears to be the point of the note: the pulp breaks down faster and the juice clears sooner.
- Why ferment at allThe brief fermentation is generally taken to break down pectin and mucilage so that the juice runs clearer and the finished syrup does not set or cloud, rather than to add flavour. Crushed berries are left in a covered vessel at room temperature until the surface foams, then strained. The recipe gives no times; it says only that the period is briefer than for gooseberry.
- The sugar is structuralThe text says so outright. Syrups of this kind are very heavily sweetened, and that concentration is what preserved them in a nineteenth-century pantry; this entry gives no proportions, so you must take them from the preceding gooseberry syrup. Reduce the sugar and you have a cordial that must live in the refrigerator.
- Citric acidSold then in crystal form at the chemist and still sold as a fine powder for canning and brewing. A few grams per litre is enough to cut the sweetness and steady the colour; lemon juice does the same job but thins the syrup and adds its own flavour.
- Storage, in practiceDo not rely on sugar alone as the original did. Bottle hot into sterilised bottles, cool, and keep refrigerated; a fermented, unpasteurised fruit syrup left in a warm cupboard will restart fermentation and push its cork.
- Yield and useAs a rough guide, 1 kg of raspberries gives in the region of 600 ml of juice, which with its sugar makes upwards of a litre of syrup. It was drunk diluted with cold or seltzer water as a summer drink, and poured over ices and granite.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) belongs to a household economy in which the fruit glut of June had to be turned into something that would last until winter. Sciroppo di lampone was less a dessert sauce than the base of a drink: a spoonful in a glass of cold or seltzer water, the ancestor of the bottled fruit cordials that Italian bars still keep on the shelf. The short fermentation step, common to raspberry, currant and gooseberry syrups across European manuals of the period, is often read today as an early analogue of the pectin-splitting enzymes that commercial juice makers adopted later, though the cooks who used it understood it empirically — the juice simply ran clearer afterwards — long before anyone could name what was happening.