To Make Lemon Wine

This recipe is drawn from the manuscript of Jane Webb, active between 1725 and 1750. It emerges from a time when English households embraced home winemaking as both art and necessity, using fruits, sugar, and yeast to create delights for the table. Lemon wine was especially fashionable among the gentry, offering a taste of the exotic and a hint of sunlight in the often-dreary British climate. Recipes such as this would have circulated among well-off women managing large households, each perhaps tweaking proportions to her own taste. A lemon wine such as this would have been considered both a treat and a medicinal cordial, prized for its sharpness and preservative powers in an age before refrigeration.

The tools of the 18th-century kitchen included large copper or iron cauldrons for boiling water and sugar, wooden paddles for stirring, and fine cloths or muslin bags for straining and skimming. A zester or sharp paring knife would be used for carefully removing just the yellow peel from lemons, with a keen eye to avoid the bitter pith. Fermentation was managed in barrels or stoneware jugs, loosely covered with cloth before being sealed with corks or wax stoppers. Bottling involved glass bottles, corks, and sometimes sealing wax to ensure wine could keep for many months. No modern temperature controls or hydrometers: the cook's senses and skill guided each step.