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Lemon Water
Take two slices of lemon, leave the rind on one, and cover with a pint of boiling water. Cover and let stand for two hours.
A cold infusion in all but name: boiling water is poured over the fruit, then the whole thing is left to cool covered. Nothing here is cooked, so the only variables are the fruit and the steeping time.
- Why one rind stays onThe peel carries the aromatic oils, the pith carries bitterness. Leaving the rind on a single slice gives you the perfume without the infusion turning harsh over two hours.
- Wash the fruitSince one slice keeps its skin, scrub the lemon well. Modern supermarket citrus is usually waxed and often treated; unwaxed fruit is worth seeking out for anything steeped with the peel on.
- A pintAn American pint is 2 cups, 16 fl oz, about 475 ml. If you are working from a British edition, an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml — a slightly weaker drink.
- Keep it coveredThe instruction to cover is not fussiness. The volatile oils that make the drink smell of lemon leave with the steam if the vessel is open.
- Two hours, and no moreTwo hours at falling temperature is plenty to extract flavour. The recipe stops there; longer steeping with the rind in is likely to turn the drink bitter, so strain the slices out once it has cooled if you want to hold it longer.
- Where to cool itLet it come to room temperature covered, then refrigerate. A drink standing warm for hours in a modern kitchen is better off in the fridge once it has stopped steaming.
- Yield and servingOne pint, enough for two or three glasses. Serve plain, cold, or barely warm; sugar or honey can be stirred in while the water is still hot if the drink is wanted sweet.
Sickroom cookery filled a whole chapter of nearly every household manual of the period, and drinks like this one were its plainest form — barley water, toast water, flaxseed tea, lemon water. A nurse could make them from what was already in the house, and they gave a feverish patient something to swallow that was neither medicine nor a meal. That this appears in a temperance book is no accident: Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the movement that campaigned against alcohol, and part of its argument was practical rather than moral. Spirits and wine had long been standard in the sickroom, prescribed for weakness and fever, so temperance writers went to some trouble to supply an alternative repertoire of cordials, fruit waters and hot infusions that could stand in their place. Lemons themselves were long associated with the sick, most famously through the British navy's use of citrus against scurvy from the late eighteenth century, though the vitamin C that explains the effect was not identified until the 1930s.