Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lemonade, Nourishing
Lemonade, Nourishing
Rub the yellow rind of two fresh lemons upon three or four lumps of sugar. Put them into a jug, add five ounces of loaf sugar, and pour over them a pint of boiling water. When cool, strain the liquid, and stir into it a quarter of a pint of lemon-juice, a quarter of a pint of sherry, and four well-beaten eggs. Mix thoroughly, and the lemonade is ready for use. Time, about an hour to prepare. Probable cost, exclusive of the sherry, 1s. Sufficient for a quart of lemonade.
This is an invalid's drink — lemonade fortified with wine and raw egg — and the raw egg is the reason it cannot be recommended today. The notes below explain the hazard and translate the older terms.
- Four raw eggs, never heatedThe boiling water is poured over the sugar and then explicitly cooled before the eggs go in, so nothing in the finished quart ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Beaten shell eggs stirred into a cold liquid and left to stand are a straightforward risk, and the drink is not cooked afterwards.
- The sherry does not make it safeA quarter of a pint of sherry in two pints of finished lemonade works out at roughly 2 per cent alcohol by volume — far below any level that inhibits bacterial growth. The lemon juice lowers the pH but does not pasteurise; acid-set raw egg preparations are still raw egg.
- Who it was made for"Nourishing" in a Victorian cookery book generally signals food intended for invalids and convalescents. Those are precisely the groups for whom a raw-egg drink carries the greatest consequences, which is the sharpest argument against reviving this one.
- Standing timeThe stated hour of preparation leaves a protein-rich liquid standing at room temperature. If you want an egg-enriched restorative drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg or a cooked custard base.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone; five ounces is about 140 g of ordinary granulated. The trick of rubbing lumps against the lemon peel to strip the zest oils is sound and still worth knowing — it captures far more aroma than a grater.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml — roughly the juice of four to five lemons. The finished yield of a quart is 40 fl oz imperial, or about 1.1 litres.
- Probable cost, 1sOne shilling excluding the sherry, which would likely have been the dearest item. Cassell's routinely gives cost, time and yield alongside its recipes, which suggests a readership keeping household accounts.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of British invalid cookery, when a substantial part of nursing consisted of getting nourishment into a patient who would not eat solid food. Eggs, wine and lemon were the standard triad: the egg supplied protein, the wine was believed to be stimulating and strengthening, and the lemon made the whole thing palatable and was valued for its "cooling" effect in fevers. Recipes of this family shade into egg flip, sack posset and the various wine whey drinks, all of them older than the book by centuries. What distinguishes the Victorian versions is the accounting — the stated cost, the stated yield, the stated preparation time — which reflects a readership of middle-class households running a kitchen to a budget and, often enough, nursing at home because that is where the sick were nursed. The technique of rubbing sugar lumps on the rind to extract the oil is a genuine survival worth keeping; the raw egg is not.<|reserved_200034|></qwerty>