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Tamarind-Juice
Mix a quarter of a pint of tamarind-juice with half a pint of cold spring water. This will make a refreshing drink in hot weather or for a sick person.
A two-ingredient sick-room cooler that assumes you already have tamarind juice on hand, which is the only real work involved.
- Imperial measuresThe book's pint is 20 fl oz, so a quarter pint is 5 fl oz (about 150 ml) and half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 300 ml). The ratio is one part juice to two parts water; scale it freely.
- What "tamarind-juice" meansNot a bottled product but the strained liquid from soaking tamarind pulp. Break up 100 g of block tamarind or wet seedless pulp in a cup of hot water, work it with your fingers until the pulp releases, then press it through a sieve and discard fibre and seeds.
- Preserved tamarindsTamarinds were also sold put up in sugar syrup, by chemists as well as grocers. Juice from those is already sweet; juice made from plain pulp is aggressively sour and will want sugar or honey to be drinkable.
- Spring waterPeriod recipes often call for spring water, likely because ordinary urban supplies were not trusted, particularly for an invalid. Cold filtered water is the equivalent today.
- Tamarind concentrateThe thick black concentrate sold for Thai and Indian cooking is several times stronger than a fresh soak. Start with a teaspoon per glass and taste rather than measuring by the quarter pint.
- YieldAs written it makes a single 15 fl oz glass, near enough two modern servings over ice.
Tamarind reached British kitchens through the colonial trade in preserved fruit, and for most of the nineteenth century it sat on the boundary between grocery and pharmacy: the pulp was a standard mild laxative and cooling agent, listed in pharmacopoeias and sold in jars of syrup. That double life explains the note about a sick person. Cooling drinks for the sickroom were a small, well-defined genre in Victorian cookery books, alongside barley water, lemonade and toast water, since feeding invalids was treated as part of a cook's basic competence. The sharp, date-like sourness of tamarind, a legume pod native to Africa and long naturalised across South Asia, made it valued for the same reason lemon was: it cut through the dullness of a sick appetite.