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APPLE WATER (another way)
Pare, core, and quarter five or six tart apples. Place them in a saucepan with a quart of water, the peel of half a lemon, four ounces of currants, and a little sugar. Let all simmer slowly together. Strain, cool, add a little white wine, and the apple-water is ready for use. This is a pleasant drink for hot weather. Time to simmer, one hour and a half. Sufficient for a pint and a half of the liquid. Probable cost, 6d.
A cooling barley-water relative, thin and lightly sweet rather than a cider. The only real decisions are how much sugar and how long to reduce.
- Quantities in modern termsThe quart is an imperial one, 40 fl oz (about 1.1 litres); 4 oz of currants is roughly 3/4 cup. The yield of a pint and a half means you are reducing by about a quarter, so simmer uncovered.
- "Currants" hereThese are dried Zante currants, the small raisins, not fresh red or black currants. They contribute sweetness and a faint winey depth, which is why "a little sugar" is enough.
- Simmer, do not boilAn hour and a half at a bare tremble keeps the liquid clear. A rolling boil breaks the apple down into pulp that clouds the drink and clogs the strainer.
- Apple choiceTart cooking apples with plenty of acid are the point. Bramleys, Granny Smiths or similar; a sweet dessert apple gives a flat, syrupy result.
- Lemon peel onlyPare the zest in wide strips with no white pith, and leave the juice out. Pith steeped for ninety minutes turns the whole pan bitter.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve or muslin without pressing the solids, then let it settle and decant if you want it bright. Pressing forces pulp through.
- The wine"A little white wine" means a splash for flavour, added after cooling so the aromatics survive; a dry white or a sherry works. It can be left out entirely and the drink still holds.
- Serving and keepingMakes a pint and a half, about 850 ml, enough for two or three glasses over ice. Refrigerate and drink within two days, as there is nothing here to preserve it.
Apple water belongs to the old family of "cooling drinks" — barley water, lemonade, toast water, whey — that sat in Victorian cookbooks under invalid cookery as much as under beverages. Before ice was cheap and soft drinks were bottled, a household made its own thin, mildly acid infusions to slake thirst in hot weather and to give to the feverish, on the long-standing belief that acidulated liquids were refreshing where plain water was not. The costing of sixpence is characteristic of the book: it treats a jug of apple water as a piece of ordinary domestic economy, made from a lemon peel that would otherwise be thrown out and a handful of currants from the store cupboard.