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ORANGE AND LEMON JUICE FOR COLDS (Invalid Cookery)
Orange or lemon-juice, strained and boiled with an equal weight of loaf sugar, and then bottled and corked closely, will prove an agreeable and valuable addition to gruel and other warm drinks which are required for invalids. Time, fifteen minutes to boil. Sufficient, a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice to half a pint of gruel.
This is a plain citrus syrup, made at roughly equal parts juice and sugar and kept as a flavouring for hot invalid drinks. It works exactly as written; the only real questions are quantities and keeping.
- Equal weight, not equal volumeThe instruction is an equal weight of sugar to juice, so weigh both: 250 g strained juice to 250 g sugar. Measuring by volume gives a thinner syrup that keeps less well.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Strain properlyPass the juice through a fine sieve or muslin. Pulp and pith left in will scorch on the pan bottom during the fifteen-minute boil and turn the syrup bitter.
- Fifteen minutes is a long boilA quarter-hour at a rolling boil will drive off much of the fresh citrus aroma and darken the syrup. Five to seven minutes at a gentle simmer, until the sugar is fully dissolved and the liquid slightly thickened, gives a brighter result, though a less-reduced syrup should be kept cold and used sooner.
- Bottling and keeping"Corked closely" assumed a cool larder and fairly quick use. Pour hot into a scalded bottle or jar, seal, and once opened keep it in the refrigerator; use within a few weeks. A cloudy or fermenting bottle should be discarded rather than boiled up again.
- Yield and dosingHalf a kilo of juice and sugar makes roughly 400 ml of syrup, a little less after boiling. The book's rate is a dessertspoonful \ about 10 ml \ to half a pint (about 280 ml) of gruel, which is a light flavouring rather than a sweet drink; adjust upward for tea or hot water.
- Beyond gruelThe same syrup is useful in hot water with a little honey, over soda water, or brushed onto a plain cake. Lemon gives the sharper flavour; orange needs a squeeze of lemon to stop it tasting flat.
"Invalid cookery" was a standing department in Victorian and Edwardian household manuals, and this entry is typical: gruels, beef teas, arrowroot and barley water, all of them bland by design and all of them badly in need of something to make them palatable. A bottled citrus syrup solved a seasonal problem as much as a culinary one, since oranges and lemons arrived in gluts and did not keep, while sugar preserved their juice for months. The link between citrus and colds long predates any understanding of vitamin C \ ascorbic acid was not isolated until the late 1920s and identified as vitamin C in the early 1930s \ but the naval experience of lemon and lime juice against scurvy had helped make fruit acids familiar in the sickroom by the mid-nineteenth century. The dose given here, a dessertspoonful in half a pint, shows the register these books worked in: the invalid was being fed medicine as much as food, and measured in spoonfuls accordingly.