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Apple Water
sugar 2 cups water Wash, pare, core, and cut apple into pieces; add water and simmer until tender; strain, add sugar to water, cook five minutes, chill, and serve. If apple is not tart, a small amount of lemon juice may be added to give a more agreeable flavor. Pears, peaches, plums, figs, prunes, raisins and rhubarb may be used in the same way. 2 cups boiling water
The text has come through with its ingredient list scrambled, so read it as a method rather than a formula: fruit simmered in water, strained, the liquid sweetened and briefly boiled. It is a sickroom drink, not a cider.
- The missing quantitiesThe water reads 2 cups. No quantity is given for the apple or the sugar, so judge both by taste, starting with one or two apples and a few tablespoons of sugar.
- A workable ratioOne large tart apple to 2 cups water gives a drink of about the right strength, with sugar somewhere between 2 tablespoons and 1/4 cup. The five minutes' cooking of the sweetened liquid probably serves to dissolve the sugar rather than to reduce it.
- Strain properlyA fine sieve will leave the drink cloudy with pulp. For a clearer liquid, pour through damp muslin or a coffee filter and do not press the solids; the recipe itself directs only 'strain'.
- Don't peel it awayThe instruction to pare may simply reflect period habit; apple skin carries much of the colour and some of the flavour, so leaving it on costs nothing, though the drink will be pinker.
- The other fruitsDried figs, prunes and raisins want longer simmering and give a much heavier, sweeter liquid; cut the sugar accordingly. If you use rhubarb, use only the stalks, never the leaves, which are high in oxalic acid.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups, or two invalid-sized servings. It is unpreserved fruit juice and should be refrigerated and drunk within two days.
Apple water belongs to the old category of invalid cookery, the small repertoire of barley waters, beef teas, gruels and fruit drinks that general cookbooks often carried for feeding the sick. Fruit waters were valued as something a feverish patient would accept when nothing else appealed, and the tartness of the apple was the point rather than the sweetness, hence the note about adding lemon juice when the fruit is bland. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and in the manner of house cookbooks of its era it surrounded the promotional confectionery chapters with a full general-purpose kitchen manual. The chafing dish was fashionable in American households around the turn of the twentieth century for late suppers and for cooking in rooms without a stove, and a sickroom was exactly such a room.