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Sugared Lemon Slices
Cut in slices 2 large lemons and lay on a plate. Sprinkle with 4 tablespoons sugar. Turn over and sprinkle with 2 tablespoons sugar. Just before serving arrange Lemon on lemon plate with lemon fork. Put any extra Syrup into the tea. Use one or more slices lemon in each glass of tea.
A garnish rather than a dish: lemon slices macerated in sugar so they release a sweet syrup for iced or hot tea. Nothing here needs updating except the timing and the equipment the original assumes you own.
- Let them standThe recipe reads as if the sugar is only a coating, but the point is maceration. Give the slices at least 30 minutes, and up to a few hours refrigerated, so the sugar draws out juice and forms syrup.
- Cut thinSlices around 1/8 inch give up their juice quickly and sit flat in a glass. Thick rounds stay dry in the middle and take up too much room in the tumbler.
- Lemon plate and lemon forkBoth were familiar items on a well-appointed early twentieth-century tea table: a small shallow dish and a narrow two- or three-tined fork for lifting a slice without fingers. Any small saucer and a cocktail fork or pair of tongs does the same job.
- Six tablespoons for two lemonsThat is roughly 75 g of sugar, which is generous by current taste. Halve it if the tea is already sweetened, or use superfine sugar, which dissolves faster into the juice.
- Unwaxed fruitThe rind goes into the glass, so scrub the lemons or buy unwaxed. Supermarket lemons are routinely coated to extend shelf life.
- SeedsFlick out the pips as you slice. They are bitter and there is no straining step later.
- YieldTwo large lemons give somewhere between a dozen and twenty usable slices, depending on thickness, with the end pieces left over; the recipe allows one or more per glass.
Alice Bradley compiled For Luncheon and Supper Guests out of the Miss Farmer's School of Cookery tradition in Boston, and it is a book about presentation as much as cooking: how to set a small table, what to hand round, what a hostess should have standing ready. Sugared lemon slices belong to that second category, a prepared accessory rather than a course. The named lemon plate and lemon fork are the giveaway; by the 1920s American households of a certain aspiration owned a specialized silver or plated fork for exactly this, one of dozens of single-purpose serving implements the period produced. Iced tea had spread widely in the United States after the turn of the century, and pre-sugaring the lemon solved a practical problem at a buffet table, since granulated sugar dissolves poorly in a cold glass while syrup drawn from the fruit blends in at once. The instruction to tip the leftover syrup into the tea rather than waste it is characteristic of the school's thrift.