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POWDERS, GINGER BEER (another way)
Take sixteen ounces of white sugar, powdered, one ounce of the finest Jamaica ginger, five ounces of bicarbonate of soda, and fifty or sixty drops of essence of lemon. Mix, and divide the powder between ninety-six blue papers. Put six ounces of tartaric acid into the same number of white papers. Use as directed in the preceding recipe.
A dry effervescing powder, not a brewed drink: the blue papers hold the sweetened alkali, the white papers the acid, and the fizz happens in the glass. Everything hinges on keeping the two halves dry and apart until the moment of drinking.
- How it is usedThe "preceding recipe" is not reproduced here, but the standard method for these paired powders is: tip one blue paper into a tumbler of cold water and stir to dissolve, add the white paper, stir once and drink while it is still working. Combined and left standing, it goes flat and faintly salty.
- Per-dose weightsDivided ninety-six ways, each blue paper is about 6.5 g and each white about 1.8 g. Dividing by eye across ninety-six folded papers is thankless; scale the whole thing down and weigh single doses, or make an eighth of the batch (60 g sugar, 4 g ground ginger, 18 g bicarbonate, 6-8 drops lemon oil, and 21 g tartaric acid kept separate).
- The acid-to-alkali ratioFive ounces of bicarbonate to six of tartaric acid leaves the mixture on the acid side rather than the alkaline side, which gives a sharper finish than a soda-heavy powder. Whatever the reasoning, the proportions work as written; there is no need to "correct" them.
- Essence of lemonNot lemon extract as sold now, and certainly not lemon juice: essence of lemon was lemon oil, usually dissolved in spirit, and far stronger than modern extract. If you substitute extract you will need considerably more; otherwise buy a food-grade lemon oil and count the drops.
- Finest Jamaica gingerOrdinary dried ground ginger from a jar, as fresh as you can get it. Jamaica ginger was the premium grade in the Victorian trade, prized for a bright rather than musty heat. It will not dissolve, so the drink is slightly cloudy and gritty at the bottom.
- SodiumEach dose carries roughly 1.5 g of bicarbonate of soda, about 400 mg of sodium. Worth knowing if you plan to drink several a day or are watching salt intake.
- StorageBoth powders must be bone dry. Sugar draws damp readily and tartaric acid more so; in a humid kitchen an unwrapped batch will cake. Airtight jars, or the traditional folded papers kept in a tin -- and keep the two colours apart, since damp is what lets them find each other.
- YieldNinety-six glasses as written.
The blue-and-white paper system was borrowed straight from the chemist's counter, where Seidlitz powders u2014 a blue paper of sodium bicarbonate and Rochelle salt, a white paper of tartaric acid u2014 were a standard nineteenth-century aperient. Domestic ginger beer powders took the same packaging and turned it into a drink, and household books of the period file them among the home-made beverages. They should not be confused with true ginger beer, which is fermented over days with yeast and a ginger "plant" and develops real alcohol; these powders give the effervescence instantly and were the sober, respectable, teetotal-friendly alternative, dispensed a paper at a time.