Friday, March 16, 2012

The Random Lemon.

To complete the week of the lemon, I want to give you a fairly random collection of recipes which I find interesting, but which did not fit comfortably into any of the other posts.

Lemon Catsup.

Grated rind of 4 Sunkist lemons

Juice of 4 Sunkist lemons

1 tablespoon grated horseradish

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons white mustard seed

2 teaspoons celery seed

4 cloves

Few blades mace

Few grains red pepper.

Mix ingredients; boil thirty-five minutes, and bottle while hot. Let it stand five or six weeks to ripen. Serve with fish.

Sunkist recipes, oranges-lemons, (1916) compiled by Alice Bradley for the California Fruit Growers Exchange.

Lemon Yeast.

Wash and peel a small potato, cut into thin strips, and put into bottles. Add three tablespoonfuls of flour into a basin, squeeze the juice of one large, or two small, lemons on the flour. In hot weather use cold water to mix all to a smooth paste, divide into two bottles, and fill with sufficient water to three parts fill each; shake well. If a bottle has been worked before with other yeast it will be ready in a few hours; if a new bottle, it will take longer. Hot water is better to mix in cold weather.

Canberra Times, Jan 20, 1933

Lemon Wine.

Or you may make your lemon wine thus, to drink like citron water: Pare five dozens of lemons very thin, put the peels into five quarts of French brandy, and let them stand fourteen days. Then make the juice into a syrup with three pounds of single-refined sugar, and when the peels be ready, boil fifteen gallons of water with forty pounds of single-refined sugar for half an hour. Then put it into a tub, and when cool add to it one spoonful of barm, and let it work two days. Then tun it, and put in the brandy, peels, and syrup. Stir them all together, and close up your cask. Let it stand three months, then bottle it, and it will be as pale and fine as any citron water.