capillaire , known as sirop de capillaire or maidenhair syrup, is a flavoring and sweetener, originally made using the tincture of a delicate fern. True capillaire has distinctive aromas of black tea, pine tar, and dried flowers. It evolved from a medicinal Renaissance-era respiratory tonic into a fashionable European drink flavoring of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Capillaire was so often used (and its recipe modified) by cafes and street vendors for tea and eau sucré, as well as by public houses and distilleries for sweetening grogs, punches, and liqueurs that written references to capillaire became almost synonymous with simple or clarified sugar syrup.
The medicinal plant Adiantum capillus-veneris was used in ancient Greece, Persia, and southern Europe and documented by Pliny under the name adiantum. Capillaire de Montpellier, its French name, paid tribute to the city of medical schools where the syrup gained its fame with European royalty.
To treat pulmonary ailments, early sixteenth-century pharmacists prepared serapium adiantinum or syrupus capillorum veneris by soaking the dried capillaire leaves in boiling water, mixing this “tea” with a tincture of licorice root, and then combining the liquid with sugar or honey. See health and spirits. Licorice was later replaced by orange-flower water, its floral aroma so dominant in the syrup that even the use of the eponymous fern was considered unnecessary by many makers toward the late 1700s.
The legend of a Bavarian prince who visited the elegant Parisian Café Procope in the early 1700s and asked for his tea to be sweetened with the syrup instead of sugar sparked capillaire’s transition from medicinal use to recreational use in France. The resulting Bavarois à l’Eau and its hot cream and chocolate-flavored drink variations became highly esteemed and their recipes included in nineteenth-century bar manuals. Capillaire was also used in the once celebrated digestive liqueur Elixir de Garus.
During the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, the Capillaire Club of Edinburgh mocked local intellectual societies, cheekily promoting the syrup’s recreational consumption while listening to the Capillaire Minuet, played at its elegant, often bawdy, parties. In nineteenth-century France, sirop de capillaire remained a tonic often prepared by pharmacists, and adherence to the official pharmacological recipe, consisting only of dried fern, water, and sugar, was enforced by the courts, though it did little to stop the commercial alterations. The deviations were more extensive in England; in 1854 the Pharmaceutical Journal reproached, “It is doubtful if Capillaire be ever rightly made this side of the Channel.”
In 1862, Jerry Thomas offered recipes for capillaire, calling for orange flower water or substituting other ingredients for the fern as diverse as bitter almond and curaçao. See curaçao. Indicating sweetening the Oxford Punch recipe he shared, the entry shows clearly that capillaire had lost its unique association with the fern and that syrup variations would change the taste of the punch. See Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”.
By the early twentieth century, capillaire was recognized as having limited, if any, medical benefits, and the fern was difficult to source. Due to recipe modifications and an unclear understanding of a single, “true” flavor profile, the majority of historic drink recipes calling for sirop de capillaire would expect the floral aroma of orange flower or a utilitarian unflavored simple syrup.
The syrup is virtually unknown today outside of Lisbon and former Portuguese colonies, where, under the name xarope de capilé, a version is served from street kiosks mixed with water as a nostalgic soft drink once favored by the noted nineteenth century Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz.
See also simple syrup.
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By: Peter Schaf