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07/18/2001 Archived Entry: "Lemon-Mint Syrup"

Today I came home to what has become a familiar sight: Sean sprawled out on the floor of my small office. He was trying to organize my recipe files and apparently he finds it helpful to cover every inch of the floor with paper. One advantage to this technique is that when I glance down at the floor, I get to revisit recipes I haven’t seen in years.

A yellowed, tattered piece of paper caught my eye today. It contained several good summer recipes that I shared when I was a guest on The McCann Program on WOR more than 20 years ago, way before I had my own program. There was Middle Eastern lentils and rice, scented with cumin and topped with a chopped salad of cucumber, tomato, and scallions, which I still adore and eat frequently. You can find a recipe for the lentils and rice (mujaddarah) in What to Cook When You Think There’s Nothing in The House To Eat. The salad I am sure you can wing on your own – cut tomatoes and cucumbers into 1/4-inch dice, about 1 seeded, large kirby cucumber for each 2 medium tomatoes, and perhaps as much as 3 scallions, using a good part of the green. Dress with lemon juice and, if you like, a little, not much, extra-virgin olive oil. I either top the pile of lentils and rice with chopped salad, or, for a “presentation” surround a hill of the lentils and rice, themselves topped with fried onions, with a circle of the salad.

On that McCann show I apparently also gave a recipe for lime or lemon-mint syrup that could be used as a base for cold drinks or to mix with a fruit salad, or, now that I think of it, as a sweetener for iced tea. I made that recipe, and it wasn’t nearly as minty as I wanted it to be. Contemplating the situation with Rozanne Gold, who had just stopped over for a hello – she said it wasn’t minty enough because I had simmered the mint in the syrup. That diminished the herb’s flavor. Just adding the fresh mint to the hot syrup and letting it steep until the syrup was at room temperature made a really minty syrup. Try it, you’ll like it.

Lime and/or Lemon-Mint Syrup

3 cups water
2 1/2 cups sugar
10 sprigs mint, with stems (a small bunch)
1 cup lemon and/or lime juice (a combination or either)

In a saucepan, bring the water and sugar to a boil. Let simmer about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the mint. Let cool to room temperature. Strain out the mint. Stir in the juice.

Keep refrigerated.

Note: Sean, my assistant, decanted the syrup into a decorative green bottle and topped it with a porcelain-topped cork, both of which I happened to have in the kitchen, then commented, “You know, people pay a lot of money for things like that.”