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Lime Zest for Tea
Lump sugar rubbed on limes until the oil cells are broken gives a dainty flavour to a cup of tea. The sugar may be thus prepared and kept in jars till needed, as with lemons and oranges.
PICKLED LIMES (A Dutch Recipe) After the fruit is thoroughly washed place it in picklecrocks covered with brine. Place a weight on top and let stand. After four days they will be ready to use. Take out as needed, only. (Also, see Pickled Lemons.)
Two separate things sit under one heading here: an oleo-saccharum for the tea tray, which works exactly as described, and a brine pickle for whole limes, which does not give enough information to be made safely. The notes below treat them separately.
- The hinge: break the oil cells, not the peelRub a hard lump of sugar over the lime with steady pressure until the face of the sugar is damp and green-tinged, then turn to a fresh face. You are after the oil in the flavedo only; once you reach the white pith the sugar picks up bitterness.
- Lump sugarPeriod lump or loaf sugar was broken from a cone and was dense and slightly coarse, which is what abrades the peel. Modern cane sugar cubes work; the pressed, very fine cubes sold for coffee crumble too readily.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. A single lime will scent a small handful of cubes; work to the fruit rather than to a number, and reckon one cube per cup.
- Keeping the sugarStore in a small jar with a tight lid, away from light. The oil is volatile and the perfume fades over a few weeks rather than months, so make it in small batches. Any hint of dampness in the jar will fuse the cubes into a block.
- Limes are not lemons hereLime oil is more assertive than lemon and can taste harsh if it sits long in hot liquid, so it is worth dropping the cube into a poured cup rather than into the pot, and pairing it with a plain black tea rather than a smoked or heavily scented one.
- Why the pickled limes cannot be followedThe recipe names no salt concentration, no temperature and no vessel size. A brine pickle of whole fruit is a fermentation, and its safety rests entirely on salt being high enough, and pH dropping fast enough, to shut out spoilage organisms. Four days at an unstated room temperature under an unstated brine is not a controlled process.
- Open crock, taken from as needed"Take out as needed, only" implies a crock opened repeatedly over an extended period. Each opening reintroduces air and hands to fruit held at room temperature under a weak, unmeasured brine, which invites surface yeast and mould that can carry the pH back up. If you want salt-brined limes, use a current recipe with weighed salt and a stated holding temperature.
Rubbing sugar on citrus peel is the old oleo-saccharum trick that also underlies punch: the sugar's crystals tear open the oil glands in the rind and hold the oil that would otherwise flash off, and cookbooks of this period seem to have applied it to lemons, oranges and limes more or less interchangeably across a range of sweet dishes. The pickled limes are a reminder that limes were more likely to reach northern kitchens as a shipped, preserved commodity than a fresh one, and brined limes were a familiar cheap sweet-sour treat for American children in the middle of the nineteenth century, famous enough that Louisa May Alcott could build a schoolroom scene in Little Women around a stash of them. The attribution to a "Dutch Recipe" in a book of this kind is loose, and may signal no more than that the compiler had it from a Dutch or Pennsylvania Dutch source rather than pointing to any documented origin.