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Lemon, Tincture of, for Flavouring
Put half an ounce of the thin rind of a fresh lemon in a pint bottle with eight ounces of best brandy or rectified spirits of wine. Let it soak for a fortnight, at the end of which time the spirit will be strongly impregnated with the flavour of the lemon. If not sufficiently strong, however, an ounce of recently-prepared oil of lemons may be added. Strain the liquid, put it into small bottles, and cork securely. Probable cost of lemons, 1d. each. Sufficient, a few drops will flavour a pint.
A homemade lemon extract, and the method is essentially the one still used for vanilla: steep aromatic material in strong spirit until the oils migrate. A few details need translating.
- QuantitiesHalf an ounce of thin rind is the peel of roughly two large lemons, taken in wide strips. Eight ounces of spirit here means eight fluid ounces, one cup, going into a pint bottle so there is room to shake it.
- Rectified spirits of wineThis is neutral grain alcohol at around 95 per cent — sold today as Everclear or similar where the law allows it, and unavailable in many places. It must be potable spirit. Methylated or denatured spirit is a different substance: it contains methanol and is poisonous; never substitute it. Brandy at 40 per cent works but extracts more slowly and carries its own flavour.
- The hinge: no white pithAll the aroma sits in the coloured outer layer of the peel. Pare it with a swivel peeler or zester so the strips are nearly translucent; any pith carried over turns the tincture bitter, and no amount of resting will fix it.
- Oil of lemonsAn ounce of lemon essential oil into eight ounces of spirit is an enormous addition by present standards, and undiluted citrus oil is a skin and mucous-membrane irritant. If you use any, use a food-grade oil and count in drops. Modern extracts use far less oil than this.
- A fortnightTwo weeks in a warm room is about right for high-proof spirit; brandy benefits from four. Shake the bottle every day or two. The colour should go deep yellow and the smell should be lemon rather than alcohol.
- Straining and storageStrain through a coffee filter or muslin, since fine peel debris will cloud the extract and eventually taste stale. Bottled in small dark glass and tightly corked, it keeps a year or more; the alcohol is the preservative.
- Yield and useAbout a cup of extract. The original's guide — a few drops to flavour a pint — is conservative for a 95 per cent tincture; a brandy-based one will need something closer to half a teaspoon per pint of custard or batter.
- The cost note"1d. each" is one old penny per lemon, a Victorian price point of no use for budgeting now, and cheap enough to suggest lemons were not a costly ingredient.
A Victorian cook who wanted lemon in a dish where juice would curdle or thin the mixture made her own essence and kept it on a shelf. Commercial flavouring essences were widely sold by this date and widely distrusted — adulteration with cheap spirit, colouring matter and worse was a running scandal of the period, and the household manuals answered it by teaching readers to make their own from ingredients they could see. The technique is straightforward maceration, the same principle behind vanilla extract and behind the citrus liqueurs of southern Europe, and the recommendation of "rectified spirits of wine" over brandy reflects the plain fact that the stronger the alcohol, the more completely it strips the essential oil out of the peel.