“The thanksgiving services in June, at the Cathedral, Colombo, as the equivalent of a ‘Harvest Home,’ were also pretty and characteristic, the church being adorned with wreaths of the glossy green coffee and cinnamon, with a profusion of pine-apples, shaddocks, brinjals, bunches of oranges, lemons, and limes, green and yellow cocoa and areca nuts, graceful pepper, and lovely nutmegs, and, in short, all manner of tropical ‘fruits of the earth.’”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Take 6 large lemons, rub them well in salt, put them into salt and water and let rest 2 days, change them daily in fresh water, 14 days, then cut slices and mince as fine as you can and boil them 2 or 3 hours till tender, then take 6 pippins, pare, quarter and core them, boil in 1 pint fair water till the pippins break, then put the half of the pippins, with all the liquor to the orange or lemon, and add one pound sugar, boil all together one quarter of an hour, put into a gallipot and squeeze thereto a fresh orange, one spoon of which, with a spoon of the pulp of the pippin, laid into a thin royal paste, laid into small shallow pans or saucers, brushed with melted butter, and some superfine sugar sifted thereon, with a gentle baking, will be very good. N.B. pastry pans, or saucers, must be buttered lightly before the paste is laid on.
Sources: The passage is from C. F. (Constance Frederica) Gordon Cumming, Two happy years in Ceylon, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Simmons, American Cookery of 1796, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — burgundy cloth, teapot stamp.