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Lemon Rind Preserve
Save the lemon shells left after squeezing for lemonade, etc., and drop them into a jar of fresh water, changing the latter every third day and at this time removing carefully the drops of oil found floating on the water. These should be put into a special bottle as they are the pure oil of lemon. At the end of two weeks scrape out the soft, inside, pulp, leaving only the rind shell. To the yellow shells sugar should be added in proportion of pound for pound and cooked slowly into a thick preserve.
LEMON PRESERVES (With White Pulp) Boil the entire lemon "husks" (after squeezing from them the juice for other uses) in fresh water until tender, then cook in a syrup (previously prepared) made of five pounds of sugar to a pint of water. Cook until preserves are thick, clear, and yellow, but not too dark in colour.
Two thrift preserves for spent lemon halves: one that soaks the shells for a fortnight to draw out bitterness, one that simply boils them tender. The second is the more reliable of the two.
- The hinge: getting the bitterness outEverything depends on softening the pith and leaching its bitter compounds before sugar goes anywhere near it. Sugar sets whatever bitterness remains, so taste a scrap of peel before you start the syrup; if it still bites, keep soaking or keep boiling.
- The two-week soakA jar of water at room temperature holding fruit for fourteen days will grow yeast and mould long before the fortnight is out. Keep it in the refrigerator and change the water daily rather than every third day, or use the second method, which boils the husks and skips the standing water entirely.
- Wax and spraysMost supermarket lemons are waxed and many are treated post-harvest. Since the peel is the whole dish, buy unwaxed or organic fruit, or scrub the shells hard in hot water before you begin.
- "Pure oil of lemon"The drops that rise off the soaking water are real lemon oil, but you will collect a few drops at most from a large jar, and they degrade quickly once exposed to air. Treat this as a curiosity rather than a source of flavouring.
- Pound for poundWeigh the drained, scraped shells and match them with an equal weight of sugar. This is a standard preserve ratio and will give a set; no added water is needed, as the wet peel supplies it, though a splash prevents scorching in the first ten minutes.
- Five pounds of sugar to a pintThat is close to the saturation limit and will crystallise if stirred or splashed once boiling. Dissolve it fully over low heat before it comes up, wash the pan sides down with a wet brush, and expect a very stiff, candied result rather than a spoonable jam.
- Judging "thick, clear, and yellow"220F (104C) is the usual setting point for a preserve, and the peel turns translucent as it is done; the very heavy syrup of the second method will run hotter still. Past that point it darkens quickly toward amber and then toward caramel, which is the "too dark in colour" the recipe warns against.
- Yield and keepingPack hot into clean jars and refrigerate; the sugar concentration is high but nothing here is processed for shelf storage.
Preserving citrus peel in sugar is one of the oldest uses for the fruit, older in Europe than lemonade itself: candied peel and citron travelled as luxury goods through the Mediterranean long before fresh lemons were cheap enough to squeeze and discard. What dates this recipe is the assumption that the shells are a by-product at all. By the time American fruit books like this one appeared, imported lemons from Sicily and later California had become common enough that households squeezed them freely for lemonade and cooking, leaving heaps of husks behind, and the domestic-economy writers of the period were constitutionally unable to let that pass. The instruction to save the floating oil belongs to the same impulse. Oil of lemon, pressed from the flavedo, was a commercial article sold by druggists for flavouring and perfumery, and the idea that a careful housekeeper might skim her own is a small, characteristic piece of period ambition.