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Almond Cream
Peel and pound to a paste three dozen sweet almonds. Boil in two quarts of milk until soft, and then add one half pound of sugar and a teaspoonful of vanilla. When cool strain through a fine sieve. Put on ice until thoroughly chilled.
Fever Drink No. 1 Wash and dry one sprig of sage, two sprigs of balm, and a little sorrel. Put in a stone jug with one small lemon, peeled and sliced thin, with a small piece of the peel. Cover with three pints of boiling water. Add sugar to taste, and keep covered until cold. Strain.
Fever Drink No. 2 Squeeze the juice of two lemons into one quart of cold water and add one teaspoonful of cream of tartar. Stir well and use at once.
Three drinks run together on one page: an almond milk and two sickroom coolers. All three are straightforward, but the almond cream needs attention at the stove and the fever drinks need a nonreactive vessel.
- The hinge: milk on low heatTwo quarts of milk held at a boil for the time it takes almonds to soften will scorch on the bottom and skin over. Keep it at a bare simmer, stir often, or set the pan in a wider pan of simmering water.
- Three dozen sweet almondsAbout 1½ oz (40-45 g) of blanched almonds, roughly a third of a cup. "Peel" means blanch in boiling water for a minute and slip the skins off; a food processor replaces the mortar entirely, though a little water in the bowl keeps the paste from turning to butter.
- Sweet almonds specificallyThe book is careful to say sweet. Bitter almonds, called for in some drink recipes of the period, are a different thing and are not sold for eating in the United States. Ordinary supermarket almonds are what is meant here.
- Half a pound of sugarJust over a cup of granulated sugar in two quarts of liquid. That is sweet by current taste; invalid drinks of the period were commonly sweetened heavily, which may have been the point in feeding someone not eating. Halve it if you are drinking it for pleasure.
- Strain properlyA fine sieve alone leaves grit. Line it with a double layer of cheesecloth or use a nut-milk bag and press the solids to get the liquid out. The recipe gives no keeping time: treat it as fresh dairy and use within two days.
- YieldThe almond cream makes about two quarts, or eight generous glasses. Fever Drink No. 1 makes three pints; No. 2 makes a quart, and the recipe says to use it at once.
- A stone jugA stoneware crock or jar. Any nonreactive heatproof vessel does the same job, but do not pour boiling water into cold stoneware or thin glass. Avoid aluminium and unlined copper with the lemon and sorrel.
- Balm and sorrel"Balm" is lemon balm, Melissa officinalis, still sold as a herb plant and dried tea. Sorrel is the sharp, oxalic-tasting leaf; a little is the whole instruction, and a little is right, since large quantities of sorrel are not something to drink daily.
- Cream of tartarPotassium bitartrate, in the baking aisle. A teaspoon in a quart of lemon water gives a faintly saline tartness; it was valued as a cooling salt for fevers rather than for flavour.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon was Helen Watkeys Moore's 1919 collection of drinks that could be made at home without alcohol, published as national Prohibition was arriving, and its title says plainly what it is for. An "invalid drinks" section was standard in household books of the period, since nursing the sick happened at home and the nurse was expected to produce something nourishing and palatable from the kitchen. Almond cream belongs to the very old European line of almond milks and orgeats, drinks that gave the body and richness of dairy in a form thought gentle on a weak stomach, and which in earlier centuries also served on fast days when milk was forbidden. The two fever drinks are the other half of sickroom practice: acid, aromatic, and cooling, built on lemon, garden herbs and cream of tartar, the last of which appears throughout nineteenth-century domestic medicine as a refrigerant salt. What the page really records is a household with a herb patch, an ice supply, and no expectation of a pharmacy.