Recipe
Ingredients
8 cups pomegranate juice, 8 cups sugar, 6 cinnamon sticks, 8 cloves, 16 green cardamom pods, 3 pods long pepper, 1 whole nutmeg, rosewater.
Method
Heat pomegranate juice to a simmer. Crack the cardamom pods, nutmeg, and long pepper with a mortar and pestle, then wrap all the spices (half the whole nutmeg) together in a cloth bag and simmer. Total simmer time was about 2 hours, with the sugar added after about an hour. At the one hour mark, I also grated in additional nutmeg. Once the infusion of the spices in the juice is to taste, remove the spice bag and reduce. Allow to cool. Add rosewater to taste.
Historical Background
This is a recreation of a plausible high-class Ottoman şerbet syrup. A şerbet is a sweetened, often spiced, non-alcoholic syrup made to be mixed with cold water or served over crushed ice. By the mid-1500s it was everywhere in Istanbul; on court tables, street vendors, and holiday celebrations. Records describe 300 şerbet shops and 600 vendors in the city. Street sellers were called şerbetçi and the palace records refer to a şerbetçibaşı, the head of şerbet-making for the Sultan.
No period şerbet recipes survive, so we have to work from earlier recipes in the same culinary tradition and from contemporary descriptions of what Ottomans were actually drinking for recreations. For the base of this recreation I used the “Syrup of Pomegranates” from the Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook, a 13th-century Arabic cookbook (trans. Charles Perry):
Take a ratl of sour pomegranates and another of sweet pomegranates, and add their juice to two ratls of sugar, cook all this until it takes the consistency of syrup, and keep until needed. Its benefits: it is useful for fevers, and cuts the thirst.
Three first-hand accounts from 16th-century European visitors confirm what period Ottoman şerbet was actually like. Pierre Belon, a French botanist traveling 1546–1551, recorded Ottomans preparing it from fruit and honey, cooled in summer with ice or snow. Nicolas de Nicolay, with the French embassy to Süleyman in 1551, noted that Ottomans “do much use to drink [sorbet] in the summer with ice or snow to cool the same.” Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Habsburg ambassador to Süleyman’s court 1554–1562, gives the best detail: he watched snow brought daily into the city from Mount Olympus, recorded a chilled drink the Turks called “Arab sorbet,” and described the customary beverage at court as a mixture of sugar, water, and various juices, which Süleyman himself poured and served at a reconciliation dinner with his son.
Bibliography
- Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook (13th c.), trans. Charles Perry. Available at daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Cookbooks/Andalusian/
- Belon, Pierre. Les Observations de plusieurs singularités. Paris, 1553.
- Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de. The Turkish Letters, trans. Edward Seymour Forster. Oxford, 1927 (LSU Press reissue 2005).
- de Nicolay, Nicolas. Les quatre premiers livres des navigations et pérégrinations orientales. Lyon, 1567.