Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lemon Wine, Quickly Made
Lemon Wine, Quickly Made
Boil a quart of water with a pound of loaf sugar until the sugar is dissolved, then add half an ounce of citric acid. When the liquid is cool, stir in with a silver spoon twelve drops of essence of lemon and eight drops of spirits of wine. Colour with a little saffron. Time, an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for three pints of wine.
This is a mock wine — a sugar syrup soured with citric acid and scented with lemon oil, with no fermentation involved. It behaves like a cordial, and it is worth knowing what a few of the named ingredients actually are before you buy anything.
- Spirits of wine is not methylated spiritIn the period this meant rectified (drinkable) ethanol from the chemist. The modern product sold under similar names — methylated or denatured alcohol — contains methanol and is poisonous. If you want the eight drops, take them from vodka or a neutral grain spirit; never from anything sold for cleaning or fuel.
- Essence of lemonA solution of lemon oil in alcohol, roughly what is now sold as lemon extract. Twelve drops is the whole flavour of the drink, so use a food-grade extract and add it off the heat, as the original directs — the oil flashes off in hot syrup.
- Citric acidHalf an ounce is about 14 g, and in a quart of syrup that gives a sharp, distinctly lemonade-like sourness. It is still sold in baking and brewing shops as a powder. Add it while the syrup is hot so it dissolves cleanly, then cool before the flavourings go in.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar, sold in the nineteenth century as a hard cone to be broken up. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing; a pound is about 450 g, which against a quart of water is roughly 1:2 sugar to water by weight.
- The silver spoonSilver is unreactive; the usual explanation given for such directions is that acid can pick up a metallic taste from tinned, iron or copper utensils. Stainless steel, glass or plastic all serve the same purpose now.
- Saffron for colourA few threads steeped in a spoonful of the warm syrup, strained in, is plenty — saffron is assertive and will flavour the drink if you overdo it. It can simply be left out; the modern alternative is a drop of yellow colouring, or nothing at all.
- Yield and servingThe recipe says it is sufficient for three pints, though a quart of water with a pound of sugar dissolved into it comes out closer to two and a half. It is a syrup rather than a beverage: serve it very cold in small glasses, or dilute with still or sparkling water. Bottle it clean, refrigerate, and use within a week or two — there is no alcohol here to preserve it.
"Made wines" like this one fill a whole corner of Victorian household books: sweetened, acidulated, aromatised drinks that imitated the colour and sharpness of a light wine without the cellar, the cost, or, for temperance households, the alcohol. Its selling point is speed — an hour, against the months a real fruit wine demanded. Citric acid and essence of lemon were both commercially manufactured chemist's-shop goods by the later nineteenth century, which is likely why the recipe reaches for them instead of for lemons. Recipes of this kind are often read now as forerunners of bottled cordial and commercial lemonade concentrate, which use much the same trio of sugar, acid and lemon oil.