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Baked Lemon for Colds
Bake a lemon whole till thoroughly tender and eat it hot with sugar just before retiring. It is best to do without the evening meal and to fast otherwise as far as possible. Also drink much water. This should be taken three nights in succession.
A two-ingredient folk remedy that survives as a genuinely pleasant hot dessert: the baking turns the whole fruit soft and jammy and knocks the sharp edge off the rind. The original gives no oven, no time and no quantity of sugar, so all three need supplying.
- Oven and timingNothing is specified. A moderate oven, 350F, for 30 to 45 minutes will do it; the lemon is ready when the skin has slumped and darkened in patches and the fruit yields completely to a spoon. Set it on a small dish or in a ramekin, since it will weep syrup.
- Pierce the skin firstA whole citrus fruit in a hot oven builds steam inside the pith and can split messily. Prick it several times with a skewer before it goes in.
- Eating the whole fruitThe instruction appears to assume you eat rind and all, which is presumably why the sugar matters. Cut the hot lemon open, scatter over a teaspoon or two of sugar, and eat the pulp and softened peel with a spoon; the bitter white pith can be left.
- Choose the fruit accordinglyThin-skinned lemons bake down better than thick, coarse-rinded ones. Scrub the skin, as you are eating it, and use unwaxed fruit if you can find it.
- YieldOne lemon per person, one sitting.
- The fasting and repetitionSkipping the evening meal for three nights running is nineteenth-century regimen, not cookery, and is worth ignoring. So is the implication that this treats a cold; it does not. It is a hot, sour, sweet thing that soothes a scratchy throat for as long as it is in your mouth.
Lemons occupied an odd position in Victorian and Edwardian household books, sitting on the line between the larder and the medicine chest. The fruit's long documented association with scurvy at sea gave it a general reputation as a corrective and purifier, and that reputation spread well beyond anything vitamin C actually does, into remedies for colds, biliousness, headaches and rheumatism. Recipes of this period sometimes specify a lemon roasted rather than a lemon squeezed, and it is often said that baking was thought to make the acid gentler and the fruit more digestible. The accompanying advice to fast and drink freely of water belongs to an older therapeutic tradition still current in domestic manuals: illness was to be starved out, and food withheld while the body cleared itself. The recipe survives less as medicine than as a reminder that a fruit chapter in a book like this was expected to cure as well as feed.