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Lime Water
Put into a glass bottle one cubic inch of unslacked lime, and pour over it two quarts of boiling water. Stir well and let stand overnight. The next morning pour off very carefully the clear water, and bottle. Keep in a cool place. It should be served in milk or cream; one tablespoonful of lime water to a point of milk.
This is a nineteenth-century sickroom pharmacy preparation rather than a drink in its own right, and the starting material is the problem: unslaked lime is quicklime, calcium oxide, a caustic industrial chemical.
- What "unslacked lime" isQuicklime (calcium oxide), not the fruit and not the mild garden lime sold for lawns. Slaking it means reacting it with water to make calcium hydroxide, and the reaction is strongly exothermic.
- Boiling water onto quicklimeThe slaking reaction can spit and froth up, and pouring boiling water into a glass bottle risks cracking it by thermal shock. The resulting spray is strongly alkaline and can cause chemical burns to skin and serious injury to the eyes; the dust is an irritant to the airway.
- No way to judge the material"One cubic inch" of a lump chemical tells you nothing about purity. Lime sold today for building, agriculture or water treatment is not made to food or pharmaceutical standards and may carry magnesium compounds and metal contaminants.
- The strength is uncontrolledPoured-off saturated limewater sits near pH 12.4, and the recipe gives no test for concentration or for undissolved sediment carried over. The dose is a household guess at what was, in its day, a dispensed medicine.
- Who it was meant forLimewater was given chiefly to infants and to invalids with digestive complaints. Those are precisely the people least able to tolerate an error in an alkali dose, which is why this belongs to a pharmacist and not a kitchen.
- It also does not keepCalcium hydroxide solution reacts with carbon dioxide in the air and skins over with chalky calcium carbonate, so an opened bottle steadily loses strength while looking unchanged.
- A note on the text"One tablespoonful of lime water to a point of milk" is a printer's slip for a pint. If you need limewater for a medical purpose, use a current pharmaceutical product on medical advice; for culinary alkali work, use a current recipe written for food-grade calcium hydroxide.
Limewater was a staple of Victorian and Edwardian sickroom practice: added to cow's milk it was believed to counter acidity, curb the formation of hard curds in the infant stomach, and settle "dyspepsia," and it appears in medical formularies and domestic manuals alike well into the twentieth century. Its presence in such a book reflects a period when the kitchen and the dispensary overlapped, and the housekeeper was expected to compound simple remedies from raw chemicals bought by the lump at the druggist's. The alkali itself has a much longer culinary life than the medical use suggests — slaked lime is what makes nixtamalized corn and lime-crisped pickles work — but modern practice uses purpose-made food-grade calcium hydroxide in measured amounts rather than slaking quicklime at home.