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Lemonade, Nourishing
INGREDIENTS for 2½ pints of lemonade.-1½ pint of boiling water, the juice of 4 lemons, the rinds of 2, 1/2 pint of sherry, 4 eggs, 6 oz. of loaf sugar. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Pare off the lemon-rind thinly, put it into a jug with the sugar and pour over the boiling water. Let it cool, then strain it; add the wine, lemon-juice and eggs, previously well beaten and also strained and the beverage will be ready for use.
If LENTIL SOUP. though's desirable, the quantity of sherry and wate could be lessened and milk substituted for them. To obtain the flavour of the lemon-rind properly a few lumps of the sugar should be rubbed over it, until some of the yellow is absorbed.
TIME.-Altogether 1 hour to make it.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is an invalid drink in the Victorian sense — a lemon posset thinned into a beverage and fortified with sherry and raw egg. The eggs are the problem: they are beaten into liquid that has already been left to cool, and the drink is never heated again.
- Why it failsFour whole raw eggs are stirred into cooled, strained liquid and served immediately. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near the 71C/160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed, and the half pint of sherry diluted through two pints of liquid is nowhere near enough alcohol to make the mixture self-sterilising. The title and the "nourishing" framing point to a sickroom drink, which would put it in front of exactly the people least able to withstand an enteric infection.
- The substitution makes it worseMrs Beeton's own note offers to lessen the sherry and water and put milk in their place. That reduces the alcohol still further and adds raw milk to raw egg. If you want a nourishing egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg or a cooked custard base.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones that had to be nipped into lumps, which is why the recipe can speak of rubbing "a few lumps" over the lemon. Granulated sugar is the same substance; only the format has changed.
- Rubbing the rindThe final note is the real technique in the recipe and it is sound: dragging a sugar lump across the zest pulls out the oil that carries the lemon perfume, which the juice does not. The same principle survives in an oleo-saccharum, sugar macerated with citrus peel, used in modern punch-making.
- "1½ pint of boiling water"An imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is about 850 ml, not the 710 ml an American pint measure would give. Note that the water and sherry alone come to the stated 2-pint yield, before the juice and eggs are counted.
- The cost1s 6d — eighteen pence — was a substantial outlay for a sickroom drink, and the half pint of sherry is likely the largest single item in it.
Victorian cookery books divide drinks into ordinary beverages and invalid cookery, and this belongs firmly to the second: a food-as-medicine preparation for someone too ill to eat, in the same family as beef tea, arrowroot gruel and calf's-foot jelly. Egg and wine were held to be strengthening in a fairly literal way, and lemon was valued both for flavour and for its long-standing reputation against scurvy and fever. Drinks of this shape run back a long way — the caudle and the sack posset of earlier English cookery are both egg, sweetening and fortified wine — and the same logic survives in eggnog and in the flip. What has changed is not the appeal of the mixture but the understanding of raw egg: the connection between eggs and Salmonella was not established until well into the twentieth century, long after Mrs Beeton's household manual had settled into its many revised editions.