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Beverages: Peel
Peel the lemons very thin; squeeze the juice over the peel and let stand two hours; then add ¼ pound sugar; mash the raspberries with pound sugar, strain the lemon juice and mash the raspberries through coarse sieve, then the pineapple, and mix all together, adding 3 quarts cold water. Stir until the sugar is dissolved; strain, and serve with a little of the fruit in each glass.
Picnic Lemonade. 1 quart water, 2 figs, Peel and juice of 2 lemons, 1 tablespoonful honey. a Put the water into a stewpan to boil; add the figs cut in two; let the water and figs boil a quarter of an hour; add the lemon peel cut in thin slices; boil ten minutes longer; pour into a jug; cover closely with paper until cold; pass through a sieve and add the honey and lemon juice. Sugar can be used in place of honey. Russian Tea. 4 teaspoonfuls tea, 1 quart boiling water, 1 teaspoonful sugar, slice lemon, 1 Maraschino cherry.
Pour the boiling water over the tea, and allow it to stand for five minutes. Into each cup put the lemon, cherry, and sugar, and pour the tea over them.
Raspberry Shrub.
For every cupful raspberry juice take cupful white-wine vinegar and 2 cupfuls sugar. Put the fruit juice, sugar, and vinegar over the fire, stir until the sugar dissolves and boil to a thick sirup; strain and bottle. All fruit juices are used in the same manner. When served, allow 1 cupful sirup to cupful ice water. Elderblossom Wine. 1 quart elderberry blossoms, 9 pounds sugar, 1 yeast cake, 3 gallons water, 3 pounds raisins, cupful lemon juice.
Several beverage formulas run together here, and a few of the quantities have lost their fractions in printing. Below are the working details for the ones that survive intact.
- Fractions to watchSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in printing: "pound sugar" for the mashed raspberries in the first recipe, the "cupful" of white-wine vinegar and the "cupful" of ice water in the shrub, and the "cupful lemon juice" in the elder wine. Treat the printed figures as incomplete rather than literal; the intended proportions cannot be recovered from the page.
- Picnic lemonade quantitiesOne quart of water, two figs, the peel and juice of two lemons, and a tablespoon of honey. That yields about three small glasses, so scale up freely; the figs act as a sweetener and body-builder, not as fruit to be eaten.
- Peel thin, and only the yellowThe two recipes that use peel (the first lemonade, which says "peel the lemons very thin," and the picnic lemonade) depend on taking the zest without the white pith. Use a swivel peeler or microplane; pith boiled for a quarter of an hour turns the whole jug bitter and no amount of honey will cover it.
- Cover with paperThe recipe says only to cover the cooling jug closely with paper. Whatever the intent -- keeping out dust as it cools, or holding in the lemon aroma -- a saucer or a plate does the job at least as well.
- Russian tea steepingFour teaspoons of loose leaf to a quart works out at about a teaspoon per cup, which is ordinary strength; it is the full five minutes that pushes modern black tea towards tannin. Three minutes gives a cleaner cup.
- Maraschino cherriesThe cherry originally meant by the name was a small sour Marasca cherry preserved in maraschino liqueur, quite unlike the bright red confection sold under the name now. A brandied or Luxardo-style cherry is the closer substitute.
- Boiling the shrub"Boil to a thick sirup" means reducing until it coats the spoon, roughly the consistency of warm honey. Judge it by eye; boil it too far and it sets hard when cold.
- Storing the shrubSugar and vinegar at these proportions make a stable cordial, but it is not a canned product. Bottle it hot into clean bottles, keep it refrigerated, and use within a few months.
- Elder blossom, not elder stemThe wine calls for the flowers only. Strip them from the green stems and stalks, which are bitter and contain cyanogenic compounds; the blossoms themselves are the traditional ingredient and are harmless.
Shrubs and fig-sweetened lemonades belong to a period when a cook thought of cold drinks as preserves rather than as things mixed to order. Fruit juice cooked down with sugar and vinegar keeps for months without refrigeration, the acid doing the work an icebox would later do, and a spoonful in a glass of water gave a household summer drinking through the winter; the word shrub is generally traced to the Arabic sharab, to drink, by way of the punch-making vocabulary of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "Russian tea" is the Anglo-American name for tea taken with lemon rather than milk, the style associated with the samovar, and its appearance in a household manual of this date reflects a general enthusiasm for anything served in the Continental manner. The elder blossom wine is older still in spirit: a country wine made from a hedgerow flower that costs nothing, of the sort that filled cellars long before commercial bottled drinks were within reach of ordinary kitchens.