A Cordial
Take seven lemons, one quart of rum or brandy, six ounces good loaf' sugar, one gill of new milk; simmer the sugar in half a pint of spring water, and skim it; let the milk be made as warm as it comes from the cow, put the very thin parings of the rinde of the lemons with the milk and syrup, into a jug with the rum, close stopped; shake well for three days, then filter through paper, and bottle it.
This is a clarified milk punch: the acid and alcohol curdle the milk, and the curds are then filtered out, carrying away harshness and cloudiness and leaving a silky, shelf-stable cordial. The instructions are complete but assume you know what is supposed to happen.
- The hinge: let it curdleThe milk is meant to break into curds when it meets the spirit (note that this version uses only the rind, so there is no juice to help it along), and the mixture will look ruined for the three days of shaking. That is the mechanism, not a mistake. Do not stir the curds smooth or discard them before filtering.
- A gillA quarter of a pint: 4 fl oz by US measure, 5 fl oz by imperial, so somewhere between half a cup and a little more. "New milk... as warm as it comes from the cow" means whole milk warmed to roughly body temperature, about 100F; there is no need to seek out raw milk, and pasteurized whole milk clarifies the same way.
- Loaf sugarSix ounces of what was sold as a cone of refined sugar; by weight, ordinary granulated sugar is a direct substitute. "Spring water" simply means clean, untreated-tasting water.
- Rinds"The very thin parings" is exact. Take only the coloured zest with a peeler or zester and leave the white pith behind, or the finished cordial turns bitter. The recipe gives seven lemons' worth of zest but never says to add the juice, which is unusual for a punch and worth noting before you improvise.
- Three days, closedThe recipe does not say where to keep it; room temperature is the usual assumption. The mixture is fairly protective of itself: a quart of spirit against half a pint of syrup water and a gill of milk works out somewhere around the high twenties by volume with a 40% spirit, which is above the range in which most spoilage organisms grow. Shake once or twice a day and keep it stoppered.
- FilteringA paper coffee filter or a double layer of dampened cheesecloth followed by paper works. Let it drip under its own weight rather than pressing, and pass it a second and third time through the spent curd bed if it is not clear; forcing it produces a cloudy result.
- Yield and keepingNearer a quart and a quarter, once the curds have taken their share. Bottled and corked, it keeps for years and improves for the first few months. Serve in small glasses at room temperature or lightly chilled.
Milk punch of this clarified kind belongs to the English and Anglo-Caribbean punch tradition of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when spirit, citrus, sugar and water were the standing formula for a bowl and milk was the trick that made the result keep and travel. Manuscript receipt books from the early 1700s onward carry versions of it, and Benjamin Franklin's letter setting out a milk punch recipe is the example most often quoted; bottled milk punch was also a fixture of well-stocked English cellars into Victoria's reign. Its appearance in a domestic collection of "genuine receipts" alongside food is a reminder that a cordial was household stock rather than a bar drink: something a family made when lemons came in, filtered, bottled and kept on a shelf for guests, for travel, or as a medicine of sorts. The technique fell out of fashion with commercial liqueurs and cold storage, and has been revived by bartenders in the last two decades under the name it has always had.