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Lemon Syrup Sauce
2 1/2 pounds of sugar. 3 lemons. 1 pint of water.
Grate the rinds of the lemons on a tin grater and scrape the zest with a fork into the sugar. Squeeze the juice in without the seeds. Add water, boil up and pass through a fine strainer. One of the best sauces for pancakes and, if made a little less acid, for tapioca and all farinaceous and cake puddings.
A heavy lemon syrup rather than a thickened sauce — the ratio here is about 2 1/2 pounds of sugar to a pint of water, which puts it well into preserving-syrup territory. It keeps for weeks and pours cold.
- Weigh the sugar2 1/2 lb of granulated sugar is roughly 5 2/3 cups. Measuring by volume at this scale drifts badly; use a scale if you have one.
- YieldSomething over a quart of finished syrup; the dissolved sugar adds appreciably to the volume of the water. Enough for a large stack of pancakes several times over.
- "Boil up"Means bring to a full boil and no more — long enough to dissolve every crystal and clarify the syrup, perhaps two or three minutes. Extended boiling drives off water and you will get a syrup that sets hard when cold, or scorches at the edges.
- The zest is the pointThe instruction to grate the rind on a tin grater and scrape it into the sugar with a fork is presumably to recover every scrap of zest and oil left on the metal. A microplane does the same job; scrape the plate clean into the sugar and let it sit a few minutes before heating so the sugar draws the oil out.
- Grate before juicingNot stated, but implied by the order of the instructions. Zest whole lemons first — a squeezed half is very hard to grate cleanly.
- Take only the yellowThe white pith beneath turns the syrup bitter and cloudy. Stop as soon as you see white.
- "A little less acid"For tapioca and starch puddings, use the zest of three lemons but the juice of only one or two. The perfume stays and the sharpness drops back.
- Farinaceous puddingsPeriod shorthand for anything built on a starch — semolina, rice, sago, tapioca, cornstarch. The syrup is doing the work of flavour in dishes that have almost none of their own.
- Straining and keepingPass it hot through a fine sieve or muslin to catch the zest, then bottle. At this sugar concentration it keeps for a month or more refrigerated; discard it if it ever looks cloudy or ferments.
Lemon syrups of this kind sat at the junction of the pastry kitchen and the drinks table: the same sugar-and-citrus concentrate was poured over puddings or thinned with cold water for lemonade. Such a syrup solved the standing problem of the plain boiled pudding — semolina, sago, tapioca and rice were cheap, filling and almost flavourless, and a bright acid syrup was the least expensive way to make them worth eating. The heavy sugar ratio is not sweetness for its own sake but preservation: before reliable refrigeration, a syrup this concentrated would sit in a stoneware jug for weeks without spoiling.