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Apple Water
Rub well three large apples to make them perfectly clean. Slice them, pour a quart of boiling water on them: let it stand some time, then strain it, and boil it up with the juice of half a lemon and a little sugar. Time to boil, five or six minutes. Sufficient for a quart of the liquid. Probable cost, 4d.
A sickroom drink from the era before bottled squash: essentially an apple tisane, thin, tart and lightly sweetened. It takes ten minutes of work and a long steep.
- QuartAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.1 litres. Five cups is the nearest US equivalent (a touch more water, so a very slightly weaker infusion); use four and three-quarter cups if you want to match it exactly.
- ApplesThe instruction to rub the apples clean rather than pare them implies peel and core go in whole, skin and pips included. Scrub rather than peel, and a sharp cooking apple such as Bramley or a firm russet will suit the drink better than a sweet dessert variety.
- "Let it stand some time"The recipe gives no time. Twenty minutes to half an hour, covered, is a reasonable reading and draws colour and flavour; left uncovered to cool for much longer it tends to turn flat and brownish.
- The boil at the endFive or six minutes with lemon and sugar dissolves the sugar and brings the whole to the boil once more. Do not boil harder or longer; the fresh apple aroma is volatile and goes off with the steam.
- Sugar"A little" means about 1 to 2 tablespoons for the full quart. Add it at the boil, taste once cool, and adjust — this should read as tart, not as apple squash.
- StrainingA fine sieve leaves it cloudy, which is authentic. For a clear glassful, pass it through muslin or a coffee filter and do not press the pulp.
- Serving and keepingYields four large tumblers. Serve cold, over ice if you like; it keeps a couple of days refrigerated, after which it dulls and should be discarded.
- Probable costFourpence is the book's own Victorian retail estimate for the whole quart, one of the standard tags (time, sufficient for, probable cost) appended to its entries. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Apple water belongs to a family of Victorian "invalid drinks" — barley water, toast water, black-currant tea, whey — that sat in cookery books alongside beef tea and gruel, in the days when nursing the sick at home was a domestic skill with its own small repertoire. The logic was that a feverish patient needed liquid, mild acidity to relieve thirst, and a little sugar for strength, without anything the stomach had to work at. The method is all technique: an infusion, a strain, a short boil. Boiling the water also happened to make it safer, though the recipe says nothing at all about why any step is taken. The same drink survives today, unmedicalised, as a homemade apple tisane.