Important: Safety Warning
This page recommends preserving food with chemicals such as salicylic acid, borax, or formaldehyde. These substances are toxic when eaten, and their use in food is now prohibited.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Lime-Juice Cordial
Mix six pounds of sugar, two quarts of water, four ounces of citric acid, one half ounce boric acid. Dissolve over a slow fire. When cold add sixty ounces refined lime juice, four ounces tincture of lemon peel, and enough water to make two gallons. This will keep indefinitely.
This is a temperance-era soda fountain syrup, and the problem with it is not the sugar or the lime but the half ounce of boric acid that makes the keeping claim possible.
- Boric acid is the disqualifierBoric acid (and its salt borax) was a standard commercial preservative around 1900 and is now barred from food in the United States, the EU and elsewhere. Repeated small doses in a beverage taken by the glass are the exposure pattern that concerned regulators. A half ounce dispersed through two gallons of cordial is not a trace contaminant, it is a dosed ingredient.
- "Keep indefinitely" was the whole pointA sugar-and-acid syrup of this strength is already hostile to spoilage organisms, but an opened jug of cordial might stand for weeks in a warm room, and the boric acid would have been insurance against that. Use a current lime cordial recipe with refrigerated storage instead.
- Refined lime juiceSixty ounces of "refined" lime juice means the clarified, filtered, often preservative-treated bulk juice sold to the drinks trade, not fresh-squeezed. It was shipped from the West Indies in casks and settled before use.
- Citric acidFour ounces of citric acid is the sharpener that makes a syrup built on cask juice taste like fresh fruit. It was sold in crystals by the druggist, and the four ounces here is by weight, not volume.
- Tincture of lemon peelAn alcoholic extract of lemon zest, made by the pharmacist rather than the grocer. It supplied the aromatic top note that the juice itself had lost, and it is the closest thing this recipe has to a flavouring as opposed to an acidulant.
- The scaleTwo gallons of finished cordial is well beyond a household bottle, and a cordial of this strength would have been diluted before serving. Any modern version should be cut down substantially.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon (Helen Watkeys Moore, 1919) is a Prohibition-era home-drinks book, often placed alongside the literature of the American temperance movement, and its lime, lemon and fruit cordials were written to give a soda fountain or a dry household something to pour that was not beer. Lime juice itself reached the trade through the British and West Indian shipping business, where citrus was carried in bulk as an antiscorbutic long before it was a mixer, and the clarified "refined" juice named here is generally associated with that commerce. The boric acid points to an older habit: before the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 and the borax feeding trials conducted by Harvey Wiley's Bureau of Chemistry, boric acid, salicylic acid and formaldehyde were sold openly as preservatives and printed without comment in ordinary recipe books. A page like this one is a useful reminder that a book campaigning for what people drank could still be entirely relaxed about what was dissolved in it.