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Lemon Water
Take the rind from a large fresh lemon, remove the thick white skin, and cut the fruit into thin slices. Put these into a jug with half the rind and two table-spoonfuls of capillaire. Pour over all a quart of boiling water, and cover closely for three hours. This is a refreshing beverage for hot weather. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for a quart of liquid. Capillaire can be obtained at most Italian warehouses.
A cold-infusion lemonade rather than a squeezed one: the flavour comes from steeping sliced fruit and a little peel, so it is gentler and more perfumed than modern lemonade. The only obstacle is the capillaire.
- CapillaireA sweet syrup, traditionally flavoured with maidenhair fern (Adiantum capillus-veneris) and usually orange-flower water, sold ready-made in the Victorian grocery trade. It has effectively vanished; the closest substitute is a heavy sugar syrup scented with a few drops of orange-flower water, about two tablespoons of it here.
- "Italian warehouses"Nineteenth-century British shops, chiefly in London, selling imported oils, pastes, syrups and preserved goods, the ancestor of the modern delicatessen. The phrase in a recipe is a signal that the ingredient was a bought item, not a homemade one.
- Take the rind, then remove the whiteThe instruction is to pare the zest thinly and discard the pith before slicing the flesh. Pith left in a long steep can turn the drink bitter.
- QuantitiesA quart is 40 fl oz imperial, roughly 1.1 litres; a US quart is about a fifth smaller, so 4 US cups of water will give a somewhat stronger infusion. One large lemon to that much water is deliberately restrained.
- Steeping and temperatureBoiling water is poured on, then the jug is covered and left three hours, which means it cools to room temperature as it infuses. Chill it after straining rather than steeping it in the refrigerator, where the peel oils release far more slowly.
- Strain before servingThe original does not say so, but three hours is long enough for the slices to go soft and papery. Strain into a clean jug and serve over ice, with fresh lemon slices if you want them in the glass.
- YieldA quart, or four tall glasses. Drink it the same day; there is no acid or sugar concentration here to preserve it.
Capillaire syrup was one of those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century flavourings that outlived its own logic. Maidenhair fern had a long reputation as a remedy for coughs and chest complaints, and the syrup made from it — sirop de capillaire in French usage — passed from the apothecary's shelf to the drinks table, by which point many period recipes omit the fern altogether, calling for little more than sugar and orange-flower water. It appears constantly in Georgian and Victorian recipes for summer beverages, negus and punch, valued less as a medicine than as a ready sweetener with a floral note. That Cassell's has to tell readers where to buy it suggests it was already becoming a specialist purchase by the 1870s; within a couple of generations it had dropped out of British kitchens altogether. The "probable cost, 2d." is characteristic of the book, which priced almost every dish so that a household could judge it against the week's budget.