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Apple Water
Six sour, juicy apples; slice in a stone pitcher, add a tablespoon of sugar and pour over it one quart of boiling water.
Cover closely, and when cold, strain.
Mildly laxative.
A cold apple infusion from the invalid-cookery chapter, and one of the few sickroom drinks in these books that still tastes good. The whole method is a steep-and-strain, so the fruit choice carries the recipe.
- Sour, juicy applesThe 19th-century sour apple was a firm, high-acid cooking variety — think Granny Smith, Bramley, Rhode Island Greening or a tart heirloom. A sweet dessert apple such as Fuji or Gala gives a flat, cidery liquid with nothing to cut it.
- Skins and cores stay inThe recipe gives no instruction to peel or core, so the apples were most likely sliced whole; skin and core will add some tannin and colour to the infusion. Wash the fruit well since nothing is peeled away.
- A stone pitcherStoneware does not react with fruit acid and holds heat through a slow steep, which is likely why it was named. Any heatproof glass, ceramic or stainless vessel works; avoid aluminium or unglazed copper, which can pick up a metallic edge.
- Cover closelyBesides keeping the drink clean, a lid will help hold the volatile apple aroma in the liquid. Cover before the pitcher begins to cool.
- Timing'When cold' means several hours at room temperature for a quart. If the kitchen is warm, move it to the refrigerator once the steam stops rising; a sweetened fruit infusion left out all day is a good medium for spoilage.
- Strain properlyPress the pulp gently against a fine sieve or double muslin to get the body out of it, then discard the solids.
- SugarOne tablespoon per quart is barely sweet by modern taste — it was meant to make the drink palatable, not sugary. Add it to the hot water so it dissolves, and adjust after straining if needed.
- YieldAbout a quart, four glasses. Serve cold, and use within a day or two; a strip of lemon peel added to the steep is a period-appropriate variation.
- On the closing note"Mildly laxative" is the book's own therapeutic claim, not a modern one. Treat it as a pleasant fruit drink.
Many English and American household manuals of the period carried a set of "invalid" or "sickroom" drinks — barley water, toast water, rice water, flaxseed tea, apple water — thin, bland, mostly non-dairy liquids for someone with a fever and no appetite. They belonged to a medical culture in which nursing the sick happened at home, usually by women of the household, and in which the cook was expected to know what to send upstairs on a tray. Apple water is the most appealing of the set: it is essentially a cold-brewed, unfermented apple infusion, close to what a modern kitchen would call a fruit tisane or an unfiltered apple tea. The note that it is "mildly laxative" reflects the era's confidence that fruit acids and pectin acted gently on the bowels, a belief sometimes connected, though only by interpretation, to older humoral ideas about cooling, opening foods rather than to any measured trial. The insistence on a stone pitcher may have had practical reasons in a kitchen full of metal vessels, though the manuals do not say so.