Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cream of Tartar, to Drink
Cream of Tartar, to Drink
Put an ounce of cream of tartar, the rind and juice of two lemons, and a quarter of a pound of sifted sugar into a jug. Pour over them two quarts of boiling water. Drink the beverage when cold. It will prove cooling and wholesome. Time, a few minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 3d. per quart. Sufficient for two quarts.
This is a Victorian "cooling drink" of a type once given to invalids and haymakers, but the quantity of cream of tartar is far outside anything a modern cook would put in a jug. The notes below explain the arithmetic and the period context rather than offering a working version.
- The dose is the problemAn ounce of cream of tartar is roughly three tablespoons, and potassium bitartrate is about a fifth potassium by weight — around 5 to 6 grams of potassium in the jug, close to 3 grams in each quart. An adult's whole daily potassium intake is in that region, and it is here in a drink meant to be swallowed cold and quickly. Hyperkalaemia from large single doses of cream of tartar is documented in the medical literature, with cardiac effects; anyone with impaired kidney function, or taking ACE inhibitors, ARBs or potassium-sparing diuretics, is at markedly greater risk.
- Not a chemical intruder, just too much of oneCream of tartar itself is an ordinary food ingredient — it is the same substance you use a quarter-teaspoon of to stabilise egg whites. Nothing in the recipe is exotic. It is purely a matter of scale: an ounce is on the order of forty times a normal culinary quantity, dissolved and drunk. For a lemon cordial, use a current recipe.
- Why it tasted right to themThe tartaric acidity reads as sharp and refreshing rather than alarming, and the quarter-pound of sugar would mask it further. There is no obvious flavour cue to warn a drinker off.
- "Sifted sugar"In Cassell's this means sugar passed through a sieve to break lumps — fine white sugar, near what we would call caster. Not icing sugar, which in the period would be called pounded or powdered sugar.
- The measures, for reading purposesTwo quarts is about 2.3 litres in imperial measure; a quarter of a pound of sugar is 113 g. "Probable cost, 3d. per quart" is threepence, part of the costings Cassell's gave throughout.
- The rindWhere lemon peel is poured over with boiling water in these books, the intent is the oil in the outer zest. Long steeping of pith turns a liquid bitter; this recipe gives no instruction to pare the rind thinly or to strain before drinking.
Cooling acid drinks were a fixture of the nineteenth-century sickroom and the harvest field, and this one belongs to a family that included "imperial" — cream of tartar, lemon and sugar in hot water — as well as lemonade, barley water and the vinegar-and-molasses switchel drunk by farm labourers. Cream of tartar was cheap and widely available because it is a by-product of winemaking: argol, the crust of potassium bitartrate that forms on the inside of wine casks, was scraped out, purified and sold as a white powder. Its tartness was thought to be actively medicinal, "cooling" in the humoral sense that persisted in domestic medicine long after doctors had abandoned the theory, and Victorian household books recommended such drinks in fevers and hot weather.