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Milk, Lemonade
Steep the thin yellow rind of two lemons in their own juice for twelve hours. Strain the juice through muslin to keep back any of the pulp and seeds. Sweeten with syrup in the proportion of two pounds of good loaf sugar--or powdered sugar of the same quantity may be used--to this quantity of lemon-juice, and add a bottle of sherry or made white wine, and from two to three quarts of good new milk, heated to the boiling point. It should be strained through the usual jelly-bag until clear. When cold this lemonade will be found refreshing and invigorating during hot weather. Probable cost, 2s. 1d., exclusive of wine.
This is a clarified milk punch in all but name: hot milk is poured onto acid and wine, curdles deliberately, and is then filtered to a clear, faintly opalescent drink. Read the whole method before starting, because the curdling is the point rather than an accident.
- The hinge: let it curdle, then filterThe milk must be at boiling point when it meets the lemon juice and wine so the casein seizes at once into firm curds. Those curds trap the proteins and haze; the liquid that drips through is clear. Do not stir it smooth or try to prevent separation.
- StrainingA jelly-bag is a cone of close-woven flannel or doubled muslin. Set it over a bowl and let it drip untouched for several hours, returning the first cloudy runnings to the bag once a curd bed has formed. Squeezing pushes solids through and ruins the clarity.
- The sugar quantity is ambiguousThe sugar quantity looks very high -- two pounds of loaf sugar to the juice of two lemons -- but the syrup is sweetening the whole batch of milk and wine, not the juice alone. Make the syrup separately and sweeten to taste if you want a less sweet drink.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones, broken up and pounded as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, and "powdered sugar of the same quantity" here means finely crushed loaf sugar, not modern icing sugar with its cornflour.
- New milkFresh whole milk straight from the cow, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Use full-fat pasteurised milk; homogenised milk curdles a little more finely but still filters clear. Skimmed milk gives a thin result.
- A bottle of sherryTake this as a standard 75 cl bottle. "Made white wine" means home-made country wine of the raisin or gooseberry sort, so a dry to medium sherry, or any dry white wine, is in the intended range.
- QuartsImperial quarts of 40 fl oz, so two to three quarts is roughly 2.3 to 3.4 litres of milk. The finished drink is a little less, since the curds hold back some liquid.
- Yield and servingRoughly three to four litres of finished punch, depending on whether two or three quarts of milk are used, less whatever the curds hold back. Chill thoroughly and serve cold.
Milk lemonade belongs to the long English family of clarified milk punches, in which hot milk is used as a filtering agent rather than as a body: the curd seizes on the acid and wine, drags down the haze, and leaves a drink that is clear, silky and far less sharp than its ingredients suggest. Recipes of the type circulate in English household books from the eighteenth century onward, and a version is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, though the technique is older and widely shared than any single author. Cassell's places it among the domestic summer drinks rather than the punches proper, and drops the wine from its costing at 2s 1d, a common convention given how widely wine prices varied. The interest in whey-based and milk-based coolers as "refreshing and invigorating" is of a piece with that placing.