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Nectar
Take off the thin rind of two fresh lemons, and put it into an earthenware jar with one pound of chopped raisins and a pound and a half of sugar. Pour over these ingredients two gallons of boiling water, let the liquid stand until cold, then add the strained juice of the lemons, and leave it in a cool place for a week, stirring it every day. Strain it through a jelly-bag until quite clear, and bottle it for present use. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for two gallons of nectar.
A Victorian raisin-and-lemon cordial made in bulk. It is barely-controlled fermentation rather than a syrup, and the two points that matter most are the size of the batch and the fact that it is alive when you bottle it.
- Scale it downTwo gallons is about 9 litres in imperial measure, and few kitchens have a vessel that size or a cool corner to leave it in for a week. Quartering the recipe — half a lemon's worth of rind, 4 oz raisins, 6 oz sugar, 2 quarts water — gives a manageable 2.3 litres.
- The vesselAn earthenware jar is a glazed crock or bottling jar; it stays cool and does not react with acid. A food-grade plastic fermenting bucket, a glass demijohn or a large glass bowl all work; avoid bare aluminium or copper with this much lemon juice.
- Rind means zest only"The thin rind" is the coloured outer layer, pared with a peeler or sharp knife. Any white pith carried over turns the finished drink bitter over the week it stands.
- Bottles under pressureAfter a week of daily stirring the liquid may well be fermenting from wild yeast on the raisins and lemon skins, though the recipe's "cool place" slows this. Sealed in modern screw-cap or corked bottles it can build enough gas to burst them; use swing-top bottles you can vent daily, or keep it refrigerated in loosely capped containers.
- "For present use"That phrase is the original's warning that this does not keep. Refrigerate and drink within a few days to a week; it will grow steadily drier and more alcoholic, and eventually vinegary.
- RaisinsVictorian raisins were commonly sold with their seeds and stoned by hand. Modern seedless raisins need only a rough chop to break the skins and release the sugar and yeast.
- The jelly-bagA jelly-bag is a fine cloth cone; a double layer of muslin in a sieve does the same job. Let it drip rather than squeezing, or the nectar goes cloudy again.
- Cost and yield1s. 8d. is the pre-decimal price in the book's own day and has no useful modern equivalent. The full quantity gives two gallons, several dozen tumblers.
"Nectar" was a stock name in nineteenth-century British cookery for any homemade lemon-and-sugar drink pitched somewhere between lemonade and a light wine, sitting alongside ginger beer, treacle beer and raisin wine. The raisins are doing more than sweetening: their skins carry wild yeast, so a batch left a week in a cool place ferments gently on its own without any added leaven, which is why the instruction to stir daily matters and why the book quietly limits it to "present use". Drinks of this class filled a real gap in a period when water supplies were not trusted and commercial soft drinks were still a novelty — a household could brew gallons for a couple of shillings, as the costing here shows. It reads as an everyday beverage rather than anything strongly intoxicating, even though a week's fermentation would have given it a little alcohol.