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POWDERS, LEMONADE (another way)
Powder half an ounce (apothecaries' weight) of citric or tartaric acid with three ounces of loaf sugar and a few drops of oil of lemon-peel. Rub these ingredients thoroughly together in a marble mortar, and divide the powder into twelve parts. For use, dissolve one of these in half a pint of cold water.
A dry lemonade concentrate: acid, sugar and lemon oil ground together and portioned out. It works exactly as written, provided the lemon oil is a food-grade one.
- The acid weightApothecaries' weight is specified deliberately: half an apothecaries' ounce is 240 grains, about 15.5 g. The sugar, given in ordinary avoirdupois ounces, is about 85 g. Do not weigh both on the same scale reading without converting.
- Which acidCitric acid gives the rounder, more lemon-like sourness; tartaric is sharper and slightly astringent. Both are sold as food-grade powders for brewing and preserving. Nothing labelled for descaling or cleaning belongs here.
- Oil of lemon-peelThis is cold-pressed lemon peel oil, sold today as food-grade lemon essential oil. A few drops means two or three for the whole batch; it is potent and will taste soapy if overdone. Alcohol-based lemon extract works but disperses less evenly through dry sugar.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was cut or crushed from a hard cone and is closer to a coarse granulated sugar than to modern icing sugar. Granulated is the right substitute; caster sugar dissolves faster if you prefer it.
- The grinding mattersThe point of the mortar is to coat every sugar crystal with the oil and disperse the acid evenly, so each of the twelve portions tastes the same. A pulse or two in a spice grinder does the same job; simple stirring does not.
- Portions and yieldTwelve portions of roughly 8 g each, one per half pint of water. Half an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups, which makes a fairly tart drink; 8 fl oz makes it tarter still.
- StorageKeep it airtight and dry. Citric acid in particular draws moisture from the air, and the powder may cake into a solid lump, which is harmless but no longer divides neatly.
- Not effervescentThere is no bicarbonate here, so this fizzes only if you dissolve it in soda water. Victorian "effervescing" lemonade powders were packaged as two separate papers, acid and alkali, to be combined in the glass.
Lemonade powders belong to the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for shelf-stable domestic chemistry: citric acid was extracted industrially from Italian and Sicilian lemons from the early 1800s, and by the time Cassell's dictionary appeared it was an ordinary grocer's and chemist's item. Acid-and-sugar powders were treated as a routine larder preparation rather than a novelty — they let a household produce lemonade with no fresh fruit, out of season, at sea, or on a journey. The inclusion of oil of lemon-peel is the telling detail: the acid supplies the sourness, but the smell of lemon lives in the peel, and without a few drops of the oil the drink reads as merely sour water.