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Lemon Juice, Artificial, for Fish, Sauces, Etc
Put half a dozen drops of the essence of lemon upon a lump of sugar. Pound it to powder, and stir it into three ounces of pyroligneous vinegar. Use as required.
This is a Victorian substitute flavouring rather than a dish, and it turns on an ingredient no modern cook should put in food. The notes below explain the terms and why the mixture fails.
- Pyroligneous vinegar is not vinegarIt is pyroligneous acid, the watery condensate from the destructive distillation of hardwood. Crude wood distillate carries methanol, acetone, tars and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons alongside its acetic acid; more rectified grades were also sold, and the recipe does not say which is meant. It was supplied in the 19th century by chemists and wood-distilling works rather than as a graded food acid. Nothing on a modern shelf is a like-for-like replacement.
- Why it cannot be tasted safelyMethanol content in unrefined wood vinegar is variable and unmeasured, and the acid strength here is unstated, so there is no way to know what is being swallowed. Refined smoke flavourings sold today are purified and standardised precisely because the raw condensate is not fit to drink.
- "Essence of lemon" is lemon oilA Victorian essence of lemon was generally oil from the peel dissolved in spirit. It is usually stronger than extract sold under that name now, and it contributes aroma only — none of the acidity or body of juice.
- It never resembles lemon juiceLemon juice is roughly 5 to 6 per cent citric acid with sugars and pectin. This mixture supplies acetic acid and peel aroma, so a sauce made with it reads as sharp and smoky rather than citric. Even setting the safety question aside, the substitution does not work.
- The measurementsThree ounces here is presumably fluid ounces, about six tablespoons; a Victorian sugar lump was of no fixed size, perhaps a teaspoon or so. "Half a dozen drops" of an essence whose strength varied by supplier is not a usable quantity today.
- What to do insteadUse fresh lemon juice, or bottled juice or food-grade citric acid from a current recipe, and leave this entry as a historical curiosity.
Pyroligneous acid was a by-product of the 19th-century wood-distillation industry, which burned hardwood in closed retorts chiefly for charcoal, methanol and acetate of lime. The sour liquor that condensed alongside was cheap, plentiful and antiseptic, and it found its way into curing brines, meat preservation and — as here — into kitchens as a stand-in for vinegar and citrus at a time when lemons were imported and dear. It is generally regarded as the ancestor of modern liquid smoke, which is the same condensate filtered and standardised to remove the tars and alcohols that made the raw article dangerous.