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Bran Lemonade
1/4 cup bran Juice of 1 lemon 2 cups cold water Let the bran and water stand overnight. Strain, and add the juice of the lemon. Chill and serve.
A two-ingredient infusion that behaves more like a barley water than a lemonade. The technique is all in the soak and the strain.
- Use plain unprocessed branThe recipe means loose wheat bran, the kind sold as miller's bran, not bran cereal or bran flakes. Anything sweetened, malted or toasted will muddy the flavour and cloud the liquid.
- Soak in the refrigeratorThe recipe says only "cold water" and "overnight," with no indication of where it stood. Cover the bowl and let it stand overnight in the fridge rather than on the counter; a starchy slurry left warm for twelve hours can begin to sour and smell yeasty.
- Strain twiceThis is the step that decides whether the drink is pleasant. One pass through a fine sieve leaves a gritty suspension; line the sieve with a double layer of cheesecloth or use a coffee filter for a clear, faintly nutty liquid.
- Add the lemon last, off the branThe juice goes in after straining, as written. Acid stirred into the soaking bran makes the pulp harder to separate and gives the finished drink a raw, bready edge.
- SweeteningNone is specified, and the result is tart and thin by modern palates. A teaspoon or two of sugar, honey or simple syrup per glass brings it closer to what most people expect from something called lemonade.
- YieldTwo cups of water in, slightly less out after the bran absorbs its share — one tall glass, or two small ones. Scale up freely; the ratio is one part bran to eight parts water by volume.
- What the straining removesVery little of the fibre survives into the glass. Most of the bran's bulk stays in the sieve, so this is a light, faintly grainy refresher rather than a meaningful source of roughage, whatever the period claims for it.
Bran water belongs to the family of grain infusions — barley water, oatmeal water, toast water — that ran through nineteenth-century invalid cookery and carried on into the health-reform kitchens of the early twentieth. Such drinks were cheap, non-alcoholic and thought to be soothing and gently regulating, which recommended them to temperance households and to the health-reform tradition generally. Bran was then largely a milling byproduct sold as animal feed, while dietary reformers argued that the part being discarded was the part worth eating. The digestive virtues claimed for it were traditional rather than tested, and, as the straining step suggests, mostly stayed in the sieve.