This is a glorious, glorious sounding paste, right? This concoction is still made today, mostly in the Korean beauty sector, touted as a facelift in a jar. It’s supposed to prevent aging nowadays. In the Victorian times, it removed freckles, which were probably actually age spots. Or some abrasion—or skin scale or blisters, or something. Whatever.
This recipe is more cooking with acid, only this time, it’s the cooking of dairy, which results in clotted cream or butter milk. I guess it could be nice smeared on the face—I still wouldn’t do it. But, if you’re ever in need of butter milk and find that you don’t have it, which is usually the case with that stuff, you can just mix lemon juice with some milk or heavy cream and you will have butter milk, which is what this beauty recipe calls for. Just without saying so.
It should be obvious to anyone why milk is good for the skin, so I won’t go into it (but it’s because it’s a cream). The lemon juice works as an exfoliant and the spirits of wine, combined with everything else, creates butter milk with grain alcohol in it. I guess that makes the buttermilk maybe a bit flammable—because when you mix grain alcohol with sugar and acid, you basically get fuel.
Which would explain why this removed freckles—but it’s unclear what this would do to sunburn unless it just removed the sunburned skin. Which, in my opinion, might create a lateral move into a different blister situation. This recipe basically creates a weakened form of chunky fuel.
Anyway, here’s the recipe:
Créme de l’Enclos
- 4 ounces of milk
- 1 ounce of lemon juice
- 2 drachms of spirit of wine
After you mix all of this in a pot, you’d simmer over a slow fire, according to the directions I have. You’d bring this mixture to a boil and, again, according to the directions, you’d “skim off the scum” once it forms. Delicious.
Scum would be the fat that floats to the surface of the rest of the stuff, as the fuel is forming, as it separates from the more liquid part of this equation but has finished reacting-slash-combining with the lemon juice and ethanol. So, this “scum” would be the “butter” part of the butter milk.
Then, you’d allow to cool, which would firm this stuff up, and you’d proceed to rub it on your face. This is much used by some persons to remove freckles and sun-burnings, say the directions. This is also much used by some other persons in their Fiats. Sort of.