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Effervescent Drink
Put the juice of a lemon, strained, in a tumbler of water, with sugar enough to sweeten it. Add half a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, and drink while effervescing.
A homemade lemon soda from the era before bottled mineral waters were cheap. It works on the same acid-plus-base reaction as any fizzy drink, and it has to be drunk immediately.
- ProportionsOne lemon yields roughly 3 tablespoons of juice; a tumbler was not a fixed measure, but 8 fl oz is a reasonable reading. Sugar "enough to sweeten" is left to taste — start with a teaspoon or two and adjust.
- Bicarbonate of sodaThis is plain baking soda, not baking powder and not washing soda. Half a teaspoon is about 600 mg of sodium — worth knowing if anyone is on a sodium-restricted diet.
- Add the soda lastThe reaction begins the instant the soda meets the acid, so dissolve the sugar in the lemon and water first and stir the soda in at the table. Fizz that spends a minute in the jug is fizz you do not drink.
- Leave headroomHalf a teaspoon of soda in a full glass will foam over. Fill the tumbler about three-quarters.
- TasteSome of the citric acid is converted to sodium citrate, so the drink is less sharp than commercial lemonade and carries a faint saline note; with this much lemon juice the soda is the limiting ingredient, so plenty of acidity remains. A little extra lemon held back and added at the end keeps more sharpness.
- YieldOne glass, made to order. It does not keep or scale into a pitcher.
Effervescent draughts like this one sat on the boundary between drink and medicine, as much a remedy as a refreshment. Nineteenth-century pharmacy sold "soda powders" in paired blue and white papers one holding bicarbonate of soda, the other tartaric or citric acid o in in the glass for the same effect; the domestic version simply used a lemon for the acid paper. Sodium bicarbonate was long given as an antacid and the resulting sodium citrate as a mild remedy for feverish thirst and nausea, so a fizzing tumbler was thought to settle a queasy stomach as much as refresh an invalid. It is also a plain demonstration of why bicarbonate leavens a cake: acid plus base releases carbon dioxide, here into the drink instead of into the batter.