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Lemonade, Effervescing
Boil two pounds of loaf sugar in a pint of strained lemon-juice until the sugar is dissolved. Pour the syrup out, and when it is cold put it into bottles, and cork closely. When wanted for use, put a table-spoonful into a tumbler three-parts full of cold water. Stir in briskly twenty grains of carbonate of soda, and drink during effervescence. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for a little more than a quart of syrup.
A lemon syrup plus a measured dose of bicarbonate, mixed in the glass so the drink fizzes as the acid and the alkali meet. The whole point is speed: it must be stirred and drunk at once.
- Twenty grains of carbonate of sodaAn apothecary's grain is about 65 mg, so 20 grains is roughly 1.3 g — a scant quarter teaspoon. 'Carbonate of soda' in domestic books of this period generally meant the bicarbonate; use bicarbonate of soda, not washing soda. Much more and the drink turns soapy and salty rather than sharp.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement. Two pounds is about 4 1/2 cups.
- A pint of lemon juiceAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, near enough 2 1/2 cups, which takes something like 12 to 16 lemons. Strain it well: pulp and pith are what make the syrup cloud and ferment.
- Dissolve, do not reduceHeat only until the sugar has gone into solution. Boiling the juice down dulls the fresh lemon aroma and darkens the syrup, and there is no need — the sugar-to-juice ratio here is already high enough to hold.
- Corking closely is not preservingThe syrup is not hot-filled or sterilised, so treat it as a fresh cordial: clean bottles, and the refrigerator rather than a cupboard. Use within a few weeks, and discard it if it smells yeasty or shows any bloom on the surface.
- Mixing in the glassA tablespoon of syrup to a tumbler three-quarters full of cold water, as the recipe has it, is a fairly tart drink; adjust to taste before you add the soda. Stir the bicarbonate in last and drink immediately, as the carbon dioxide escapes within a minute or two.
- Citric acid is doing the workThe fizz comes from the acid of the lemon reacting with the bicarbonate.
- YieldA little over a quart of syrup — something like seventy to eighty glasses at a tablespoon each. The 'probable cost, 2s. 6d.' is the book's own estimate of the ingredients and no guide to anything now.
Effervescing lemonade belongs to the decades when fizzy drinks were assembled at the point of drinking rather than bought sealed. Bottled carbonated water existed from the late eighteenth century onward, but it was expensive and unreliable, so households and chemists' shops alike kept a lemon syrup on hand and generated the gas in the tumbler with a dose of bicarbonate — the same principle behind seidlitz powders and the paper-wrapped "lemonade powders" sold by druggists. It had a double life: it was refreshment, but it was also a mild antacid, and the line between the two was thin in Victorian domestic medicine. The practice faded once industrial bottling and the soda siphon made ready-carbonated water cheap, though it survives in spirit in every effervescent tablet dropped into a glass of water.