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TO CURE A COUGH
Roast a lemon very carefully without burning it; when it is thoroughly hot, cut and squeeze into a cup upon three ounces of sugar, finely powdered. Take a spoonful whenever the cough is troublesome. It is as good as it is agreeable to the taste.
This is a two-ingredient lemon syrup from the medical chapter, and it makes only a few spoonfuls. Treat it as a soothing sweet, not as treatment for anything.
- Three ounces of sugarThat is a weight, not a volume: roughly 6 to 7 tablespoons, a generous third of a cup of granulated sugar. "Finely powdered" means sugar ground fine in a mortar so it dissolves in the small amount of hot juice; superfine (caster) sugar does the same job.
- Roasting the lemonThe recipe says only "roast" and gives no equipment or temperature. As a modern equivalent, a 375F oven for 15-20 minutes, or a dry skillet turned often, softens the fruit and the pith without scorching the peel. Burnt zest turns the whole thing bitter, which is why the instruction insists on care.
- Why heat it at allA hot lemon gives up noticeably more juice and some of the aromatic oil from the skin, and the warmth dissolves the sugar without added water. Squeeze it while it is still too hot to hold comfortably.
- YieldOne large lemon yields about 3 tablespoons of juice, which with the sugar dissolved gives something over a third of a cup of thick syrup: a handful of spoonfuls, depending on the size of the spoon. It does not keep well at room temperature; refrigerate and use within a couple of days.
- ConsistencyAt this ratio the sugar may not fully dissolve cold. If it does not, stir over gentle heat, or stand the cup in hot water, until it clears.
- What it is notSugar and citrus coat and soothe an irritated throat, which is the whole of the effect. Nothing here treats the cause of a cough, and a persistent one is a matter for a doctor.
Nineteenth-century household manuals often carried a medical department as a matter of course, since the nearest physician might be a day's drive away. Cough remedies of this kind fall into a long family of sugar-and-acid demulcents: honey and vinegar, horehound candy, flaxseed and lemon teas, syrup of squills. Lemons were plausibly a costly imported item in inland Ohio at the time, which may be part of why a single fruit is stretched with three ounces of sugar and doled out by the spoonful. The compilers close by saying the remedy "is as good as it is agreeable to the taste" — a claim that it works as well as it tastes, at a time when alternatives on offer included paregoric, ipecac, and tar and turpentine preparations.