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Lemonade, Portable
Rub the rind of a large fresh lemon upon three ounces of loaf sugar. Crush it to powder, and mix with it half an ounce of tartaric acid. When thoroughly blended, put the powder into a glass bottle, and cork closely. It will keep for some time. When wanted for use, stir a spoonful of the powder into a glassful of water. Time, half an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for a dozen tumblers of lemonade.
A shelf-stable lemonade powder built on two things: sugar saturated with lemon oil, and an acid to stand in for the juice. It works, but the proportions need reading closely.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone, which is why the recipe tells you to crush it after rubbing. Three ounces is about 6 to 7 tablespoons of granulated sugar; use cubes or coarse granulated so there is a surface to abrade the zest against, then grind fine in a mortar or spice grinder.
- The hinge: rub, do not grateRubbing whole sugar over the intact rind pulls the oil out of the peel and traps it in the sugar without carrying any bitter white pith. Grating the zest instead gives you damp fragments that are more prone to clumping. This oil-and-sugar mixture is known as an oleo-saccharum.
- Tartaric acidHalf an ounce is roughly 3 teaspoons, and it is food-grade tartaric acid, sold for winemaking and baking. Citric acid can be substituted by weight and tastes rather more like fresh lemon; tartaric is sharper and slightly drier on the tongue.
- Acid to sugar ratioHalf an ounce of acid to three ounces of sugar is a bracing 1:6. It is close to a Victorian palate for "sharp" drinks; taste one glass before committing, and increase the sugar if it strikes you as austere.
- "A spoonful" is vagueThe book gives no size. Working back from the stated yield of twelve tumblers and a total batch of about 3.5 ounces, one serving is roughly 2 slightly heaped teaspoons in 8 to 10 oz of cold water. Adjust from there rather than trusting the word.
- Keeping it dryA sugar-and-acid powder will draw damp and can set into a brick in a humid kitchen. A glass jar with a genuine seal, kept away from the stove, is what "cork closely" was reaching for; break up any caking with a fork before measuring.
- No fizzThere is no bicarbonate here, so this dissolves into a still drink. The effervescent lemonade powders of the same era added an equal-ish measure of soda, which reacts with the tartaric acid the moment water hits it.
Portable foods, powders and essences that travelled without spoiling, were a preoccupation of nineteenth-century domestic writing, and lemonade powder sat alongside portable soup and portable broth. Tartaric acid, isolated from the crystalline argol scraped out of wine casks, was cheap and widely sold by chemists, so a household could imitate lemon juice all year at a time when fresh lemons were seasonal and expensive imports. The costing of fourpence for a dozen tumblers is the point of the entry: the flavour came from the rind of a single lemon, the sourness from the chemist, and nothing was wasted. The technique of rubbing sugar on citrus peel is much older than the powder and is generally traced to punch-making, where the oleo-saccharum was the foundation of the bowl.