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PEPPER WATER (for flavouring)
Strain the juice of a fresh lemon into a pint and a half of cold water. Slice an onion and pound it in a mortar, with twelve peppercorns, three cloves of garlic, a table-spoonful of curry-powder, and a dessert-spoonful of salt. Put all into a saucepan, bring the liquid to the point of boiling, cover closely, and let it simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, then strain it through muslin. Put with it a small onion which has been chopped fine and fried lightly in butter. Boil up once more, and the pepper water is ready to be bottled. Cork closely, and store in a cool, dry place. In India, where this recipe is in great repute, a piece of tamarind is substituted for the lemon-juice. Probable cost, 2d. per pint.
The infusion itself is ordinary kitchen work; the problem is the last line. A garlic-and-onion liquid, bottled and kept in a cool cupboard, is the textbook setting for Clostridium botulinum, and no part of this method addresses that.
- Why the storage failsGarlic and onion are soil vegetables and can carry botulinum spores. Suspended in a low-acid water and sealed under a cork away from air, those spores can germinate and produce toxin at room temperature. A quarter-hour simmer kills the bacteria but not the spores, so the bottle becomes an incubator rather than a preserve.
- The lemon does not make it safeThe juice of one lemon in a pint and a half of water gives no reliable acidity, and the recipe offers no measured pH or processing temperature. The tamarind substitute mentioned for India is likewise unquantified. Shelf-stable bottling of a garlic infusion needs a tested, measured modern recipe; use one of those if you want something to keep.
- The fried onion added at the endThe chopped onion cooked in butter is stirred in after straining and given only a brief return to the boil. That reintroduces solid vegetable matter, and a little fat with it, into the bottle after the straining step, which adds to the storage problem rather than helping it.
- UnitsA pint and a half in a British book of this date is 30 fl oz, about 850 ml, not the American 24 fl oz. A dessert-spoonful sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly two teaspoons.
- Curry-powderVictorian commercial curry powder was typically turmeric-heavy and coarsely ground. If you use a modern hot blend, a tablespoon will be a considerably stronger seasoning than the book is likely to have intended.
- Pounding in a mortarThe onion, peppercorns and garlic are pounded to a paste so the flavour extracts fast in a short simmer. A small blender or spice grinder does the same job; simply slicing the aromatics gives a thinner, flatter infusion.
- Probable costThe book gives the cost as twopence a pint, a costing figure of the sort attached to recipes throughout this period rather than a price you can act on.
"Pepper water" is a direct English translation of the Tamil miḷagu taṇṇīr — pepper water — the thin, sour, peppery broth of southern India that English speakers know in one form as rasam, and whose name is generally traced as the origin of "mulligatawny." British households in India took the idea in two directions: a soup thickened with lentils and often meat, which came home as mulligatawny, and a plain seasoning liquid like this one, kept bottled and splashed into stews, gravies and made dishes to give them a note the English store cupboard could not supply. The title's own qualification — "for flavouring" — tells you how it was regarded: not a dish but a flavouring. The tamarind noted as the Indian substitute for lemon is in fact the older and more authentic souring agent; the lemon is the English adaptation.