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Lemon Paste for Dessert
Choose sound fresh lemons, boil them in two or three waters, and season the first with a handful of salt. When they are tender, drain and let them cool, then put them into a bowl, and beat them to a pulp with a rolling-pin. Pass this pulp through a sieve, and squeeze it well to cause as much as possible to go through. Weigh the pulp. Mix with it an equal quantity of pounded sugar, and stir it without ceasing until it is so dry as to leave the sides of the saucepan and come up with the spoon. Press it into shallow dishes, and put these into a cool oven until the paste is quite dry. It may then be cut into small squares, strips, or any other shape. These should be placed in single layers in a tin box, with foolscap paper between the layers. Time, altogether, about four hours. Probable cost of lemons, 1d. each.
This is a fruit paste in the old sense — the same family as quince cheese or membrillo — made from whole lemons cooked to tenderness, sieved, and dried with their own weight in sugar. The recipe assumes you know that the sugar-and-pulp mixture is stirred over heat, and it never says so.
- The boiling waters are the hingeTwo or three changes of water, the first salted, draw much of the bitterness out of the peel and pith; without them the paste is likely to be unpleasantly bitter. Boil until a skewer passes through the whole fruit with no resistance, topping up with fresh boiling water each time.
- "Stir it without ceasing" means over heatThe mixture of sieved pulp and sugar goes into a heavy saucepan on a low to medium flame and is stirred constantly until it thickens and pulls cleanly from the sides — the classic fruit-cheese test, and the only test the recipe itself gives. It spits as it thickens; a long-handled wooden spoon and a deep pan help.
- Pounded sugarCaster or superfine sugar. Loaf sugar, crushed and sifted at home, was still common in Victorian kitchens, though refined granulated and caster sugars were also sold by this date; granulated will work but dissolves more slowly into the pulp.
- Equal quantity, by weightWeigh the sieved pulp and match it exactly with sugar. This is a ratio recipe, so scale it to however many lemons you have — six good lemons yield roughly 10-12 oz of sieved pulp.
- A cool ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "cool oven" is conventionally taken as somewhere around 200-250F, with the door propped slightly ajar, or a dehydrator at 135-145F. The point is evaporation, not baking; if the surface colours, the oven is too hot. Four hours is the figure given for the whole process, and the drying stage may well take longer in a modern oven; it is finished when the paste is firm enough to cut without sticking.
- Shallow dishesLine a rimmed tray or shallow tin with parchment and spread the paste no more than half an inch deep. Thicker than that and the centre stays tacky however long you dry it.
- Foolscap paperFoolscap was a standard size of writing paper, used here simply as a non-stick interleaf. Use parchment or waxed paper, and store the squares in an airtight tin rather than a loose box — the paste will soften in humid air.
- The costing"1d. each" is one pre-decimal penny per lemon. The costing covers the lemons only and says nothing about the sugar, which matches the pulp by weight.
Fruit pastes of this kind belong to a long English tradition, descended from the medieval and Tudor "marmalades" and "quiddonies" — stiff, sliceable fruit cheeses cut into shapes and served at the end of a meal with wine. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century such things had migrated from the banquet's final course to the dessert plate and the tea table, and the method is generic: boil the fruit soft, sieve it, cook it down with its own weight in sugar, dry it. Lemons are a less usual choice than quince, apple or apricot, and the repeated boiling here exists to tame the peel — a reminder that until candied peel became a shop-bought staple, cooks handled whole citrus and dealt with its bitterness themselves.