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Spirit of Lemon-Peel
When fresh lemons cannot be procured, mix two ounces of rectified spirits of wine with one drachm of essential oil of lemons. Put the preparation into a small bottle, and keep it closely stoppered till wanted. The flavour of fresh lemon-peel may be imparted to any dish by the addition of three or four drops of this mixture. A few drops of it will also convert a tumblerful of water into lemonade.
This is a lemon extract — the same thing sold in small brown bottles today, at roughly the same strength. The whole recipe hinges on the oil being a food-grade citrus oil, not an aromatherapy product.
- Food-grade oil only"Essential oil of lemons" in a Victorian kitchen meant expressed lemon peel oil bought from a chemist for culinary use. Most lemon essential oil sold now is labelled for fragrance or topical use and may be diluted in carrier oils or otherwise unfit to eat; buy one explicitly sold as food grade or as a flavouring oil.
- Rectified spirits of wineThis is neutral ethanol, around 90 per cent in the pharmacopoeial sense. A high-proof neutral grain spirit is the closest match. Ordinary 40 per cent vodka will carry far less oil and the mixture is likely to turn cloudy or separate.
- A drachmAlmost certainly a fluid drachm, one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.6 ml or three-quarters of a teaspoon. Read as apothecary weight it would be 60 grains, near enough 3.9 g, so either reading lands in the same place.
- Two ouncesTwo fluid ounces is about 57 ml, so a little under 4 tablespoons of extract in total — a working strength of roughly 6 per cent oil, in line with commercial lemon extract.
- DosingThree or four drops carries only a trace of oil, but it is still easy to overshoot into something soapy or medicinal. Add it at the end of mixing, taste, and stop early.
- The lemonade claimA few drops in a tumbler of water gives you lemon aroma and nothing else — no sugar, no acidity, and no juice. Expect the oil to bead on the surface unless it is first stirred into sugar or syrup, and add citric acid or a little juice if you want it to read as lemonade.
- StorageCitrus oils oxidise and go turpentine-like. Keep the bottle full, tightly stoppered, dark and cool, and treat it as good for about a year rather than indefinitely, whatever "till wanted" suggests.
Cassell's belongs to a period when a well-run English kitchen kept a shelf of bought or homemade essences — lemon, almond, vanilla, ratafia — because fresh flavourings were seasonal and expensive. Lemons came largely from Sicily and Spain and were dear or absent in late winter, while the oil expressed from their peel travelled and kept, so the chemist's shop filled the gap the greengrocer left. The work is stock-keeping rather than cooking, the sort of small compounding job often said to have fallen to the cook herself, in the same spirit as making one's own baking powder or curry paste. The alcohol here is doing purely technical work, as it still does in commercial extracts — lemon oil will not disperse in water, but it dissolves readily in spirit, and a few drops of the solution will then carry through a batter or a syrup.