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Lemon Juice, to Preserve
Choose fine fresh lemons, and squeeze the juice from them. Strain it through muslin, and put it into bottles, pour over it sufficient olive-oil to cover it entirely, and cork the bottles securely. It will keep for some time. Or, put half a pint of strained lemon-juice into a basin, and with it half a pound of finely-pounded and sifted loaf sugar. Stir it with a silver spoon until the sugar is dissolved. Put it into small bottles, cork it closely, and tie bladder over the corks. Probable cost of lemons, 1d. each.
Two separate methods sit in one paragraph: a plain juice sealed under a film of oil, and a sweetened lemon syrup. The second is far more reliable, and both want the refrigerator rather than the larder.
- The measuresHalf a pint here is the imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups; half a pound of sugar is roughly 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated. That works out at a heavy syrup, close to equal parts by volume of juice and sugar.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a solid cone, chipped off and pounded as needed. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the same thing already broken down, so the pounding and sifting can be skipped.
- The silver spoonNot affectation. Lemon juice attacks base metals and picks up a tinny taste from iron or unlined copper. Use stainless steel, glass or wood, and a glass or ceramic bowl rather than aluminium.
- Bladder over the corkA sheet of cleaned bladder, soaked soft, tied over the neck and left to dry drum-tight, was a common Victorian airtight seal. A screw-top glass bottle does the same job.
- The oil sealThe layer of olive oil excludes air from the surface, which slows browning and oxidation. It does nothing against mould and yeast, so treat oil-covered juice as a refrigerator preparation of a few weeks, not a shelf-stable one, and discard it at the first sign of fuzz or fermentation. Pour the juice out from under the oil rather than tipping the bottle about.
- How long "some time" isLemon juice is acid enough (around pH 2.3) that it is not a botulism risk, but it loses aroma and vitamin C quickly at room temperature. Refrigerated, plain strained juice keeps three or four days with good flavour; the sugared version keeps a month or more in the cold.
- The modern equivalentFor long storage, freeze strained juice in ice-cube trays and bag the cubes. One standard cube is about 2 tablespoons, which is close to the yield of a single lemon.
- Yield and useSix to eight lemons give the half-pint called for. The sweetened version is essentially lemon syrup: a tablespoon or two in a glass of still or sparkling water makes lemonade, and it also serves for jellies, puddings and sauces.
Keeping lemons useful out of season was a real household problem. Fruit reached Britain from Spain, Portugal and Sicily by sea, arriving in waves, so a cook bought cheaply when the market was full and tried to hold the juice over. Sealing under a film of oil is an old method, and similar reasoning lay behind the Royal Navy's practice of dosing preserved lemon, and later lime, juice against scurvy from the late eighteenth century onward, though naval juice was often boiled down and fortified with spirit and lost much of its value in the process. The penny-a-lemon costing is characteristic of the book, which prices nearly everything so a housekeeper could reckon a dish before making it.