Blackberry Syrup — For Dysentery in children

History

This recipe is number 102 in Abby Fisher's "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881), printed under the heading "Blackberry Syrup— For Dysentery in children." It is one of several home remedies Fisher set down alongside her soups, pickles, and preserves. Fisher — born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton — could neither read nor write, and dictated the book to friends and to her husband; genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. the book is among the earliest published cookbooks by an African-American author. After settling in San Francisco, she ran a pickle and preserves business and won prizes for her work, including two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880 and a diploma at the 1879 Sacramento State Fair.

Fisher attached the remedy directly to the world she came from. The recipe closes with her own attribution — Fisher records it as an old Southern plantation remedy she knew from the Black families she came from — placing the syrup within the home medicine of enslaved and formerly enslaved Southern Black communities as Fisher knew and practiced it. Food historians read entries like this one as brief but telling records of how enslaved people cared for their families with the means available to them.

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular syrup. What is documented is the recipe itself and Fisher's own account of where it came from: a Southern plantation remedy she carried, mastered, and published under her own name.

Ingredients

• 1 quart blackberries
• 1 pound sugar
• 1 ounce whole cloves
• 0.5 ounce cinnamon

Instructions

1. Mash the blackberries fine in a bowl, squeezing all the juice from them.
2. Strain the juice through a thin muslin cloth.
3. Add the crushed sugar to the juice and put to boil in a porcelain saucepan.
4. Add the whole cloves and the cinnamon (tied up in a clean cloth) to the boiling syrup.
5. Boil steadily for two hours.
6. Pour into bottles when cool.