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Powders, Ginger Beer
Take one to two drachms of white sugar, powdered, twenty-six grains of bicarbonate of soda, six grains of the finest Jamaica ginger, powdered, and one drop of essence of lemon. Mix these ingredients, and wrap the powder in blue paper. Take thirty-five grains of powdered tartaric acid, or thirty grains of powdered citric acid, and wrap in white paper. To use, dissolve each colour in about half a glassful of water; mix the two, and drink whilst effervescing.
This is not brewed ginger beer but an apothecary-style effervescing powder: an alkali in one paper, an acid in the other, combined in the glass. The measurements are in apothecaries' weight, so scaling matters more than anything else here.
- The unitsA grain is about 65 mg and a drachm about 3.9 g. So the blue paper is roughly 4–8 g sugar (1–2 teaspoons), 1.7 g bicarbonate of soda, and 0.4 g ground ginger; the white paper is about 2.3 g tartaric acid or 1.9 g citric acid. A jeweller's or drug scale reading to 0.1 g is the only practical way to weigh these.
- Why two papersBlue paper held the alkali and white the acid, a chemist's convention that kept them dry and apart. Any moisture that reaches both at once sets off the reaction early and the powder goes flat in storage, so keep them folded separately and airtight.
- Get the ratio rightThe acid is somewhat in excess of what is needed to neutralise the soda, which is what gives the drink its tartness. Increasing the soda leaves a soapy, salty aftertaste; increasing the acid makes it sharper still. Change the sugar and ginger freely, leave the other two alone.
- Essence of lemonIn nineteenth-century usage this generally meant oil of lemon, commonly dissolved in spirit, and was far stronger than the flavouring extract sold today. One drop of food-grade lemon oil is the closest match; a modern extract will need more, and it goes in the sugar paper.
- The gingerPowdered ginger does not dissolve, it suspends, and the finest grind available will still settle. Stir the blue paper into its water well and drink promptly. Jamaica ginger was prized for aroma rather than heat; modern ground ginger is a reasonable stand-in.
- Acid choiceTartaric acid gives a slightly rounder, winier sourness, citric a cleaner lemon note. Both are sold as food-grade powders for brewing and preserving; citric acid sold for cleaning is not certified food-grade, so use the food-grade product.
- YieldOne pair of papers makes a single glass, the two half-glasses combined; the recipe does not say what size the glass is. The papers are worth making up a dozen at a time.
Effervescing powders were a nineteenth-century crossover between the dispensary and the drinks table. The two-paper format, blue for the alkali and white for the acid, comes straight from pharmacy, where the same arrangement was used for Seidlitz powders and other saline draughts, and flavoured versions were sold as refreshment as well as physic. The effect is chemical rather than culinary: carbon dioxide raised in the glass on demand, at a time when bottled aerated waters were a bought luxury and mineral-water machinery was beyond a domestic kitchen. The name is borrowed loosely — real ginger beer of the period was fermented with yeast over days and had a slight alcohol content — while this gives the fizz and the flavour in under a minute. Jamaica ginger was the trade's premium grade, generally regarded as the most fragrant, and its appearance here signals a drink meant to be pleasant rather than merely medicinal.