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Lemonade (Wash and peel three lemons)
Wash and peel three lemons very thin and put the peelings in a jug with four tablespoonfuls of sugar. Pour over them one quart of boiling water, and when cool add to the strained juice of the lemons.
A hot-infusion lemonade: the zest is steeped in boiling syrup water so the oils come through, and the juice goes in only after cooling. Two details carry the whole drink.
- Peel thin, and only the yellow"Very thin" is the instruction that matters. Use a vegetable peeler or zester and take only the coloured layer; any white pith turned into the jug will make the finished lemonade bitter over a long steep.
- Add the juice coldBoiling water on lemon juice dulls and flattens the flavour. Let the peel infusion cool to at least room temperature before the strained juice goes in, exactly as written.
- Quantities in modern termsOne quart is 4 cups (about 950 ml). Four tablespoonfuls of sugar is roughly 50 g, which is restrained by modern soft-drink standards; taste after the juice is in and add more if wanted.
- The jugAny heatproof pitcher or bowl will do, but glass can crack under a quart of boiling water. Warm it first, or steep in a saucepan and transfer.
- Strain twiceThe recipe strains the juice; strain the peel out too, or the infusion keeps extracting and goes resinous. A fine sieve or a square of muslin is enough.
- YieldAbout a quart, or three to four glasses without ice, two or three over ice. Chill thoroughly before serving; this is a drink that tastes thin when merely cool.
- Lemon sizeLemons vary; aim for about 1/2 cup of juice in total and adjust the sugar to match.
Collections like this one supplied the hostess who needed something to pour that was not wine or punch. The method here is older than the book, though: steeping the peel in hot sugar water is the classic way to capture the oils in the zest, which carry most of what people recognise as lemon flavour, while the juice supplies only the acid. The aim is much the same as that of the oleo-saccharum of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century punch making, though the mechanism differs, since oleo-saccharum draws the oils out by macerating the peel in sugar cold rather than steeping it in hot water.