Draught for Summer
-INGREDIENTS. - The juice of 1 lemon, a tumblerful of cold water, pounded sugar to taste, small teaspoonful of carbonate of soda.
Squeeze the juice from the lemon; strain, and add it to the water, with sufficient pounded sugar to sweeten the whole nicely.
Wher well mixed, put in the soda, stir well, and drink while the mixture is in an effervescing state.
A homemade fizzy lemonade that works by acid-base reaction rather than carbonation equipment. Everything hinges on drinking it the moment it foams.
- TumblerfulA Victorian tumbler holds roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so about 1 to 1¼ cups of cold water. Use a glass considerably larger than that, or a jug, because the soda will make the liquid climb.
- Carbonate of sodaIn Victorian cookery books this phrase is generally used loosely for bicarbonate of soda, i.e. ordinary baking soda, rather than washing soda (sodium carbonate proper) or baking powder. Read the 'small teaspoonful' conservatively, on the order of ½ teaspoon; more will taste soapy and salty rather than sharp.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar, equivalent to caster or superfine sugar. It matters here only because it dissolves before the fizz dies; granulated works if you stir it into the lemon juice first.
- Order of operationsSugar and juice go in first and should be fully dissolved. The recipe is explicit that the soda goes in only 'when well mixed'; stirring an unmixed glass after the soda is in loses effervescence.
- Drink at onceThe carbon dioxide is released in seconds and the drink is flat within a minute or two. Left standing, what remains is sweetened lemon water with a faintly salty edge.
- SodiumHalf a teaspoon of baking soda carries roughly 600 mg of sodium. Worth knowing if you are watching salt intake, and a reason not to make several in a row.
- YieldOne glass, for one person.
Effervescing draughts sat on the border between the kitchen and the medicine chest in the nineteenth century. Chemists sold saline draughts and Seidlitz powders — paired papers of an acid and an alkali to be dissolved and drunk while foaming — and domestic manuals offered household versions using lemon juice in place of tartaric acid. Beeton's book, which mixes cookery with invalid dishes and simple remedies, files this among summer beverages, but its ancestry is pharmaceutical: bicarbonate was taken for indigestion and for the general heat-sickness of hot weather.