Limoncello by Tea Towel: Possibly the Most Entertaining Recipe in Our Kitchen

Recipes can turn up in the strangest places.

My wife recently found this rather splendid tea towel bearing a recipe for homemade Limoncello. Not only does it provide the recipe in the original Italian, it helpfully supplies an English translation.

Well... mostly English.

The tea towel informs us that we should “Take only che lemons peel”, place it in an “hermetically selled container”, and eventually “put it in a sottle.”

You really couldn't make it up, although somebody apparently did!

Behind the wonderfully eccentric translation, however, there is a perfectly recognisable recipe for the famous and delicious Italian lemon liqueur.

The tea towel's Limoncello recipe

According to our newly discovered piece of kitchen literature, you'll need:

1 litre of water

1 litre of alcohol

1 kilo of sugar

8 lemons

The Italian instructions make things rather clearer than their adventurous English counterpart.

You remove just the peel from the eight lemons, cutting it thinly, then put the peel into the alcohol in a tightly sealed jar.

Leave this infusion for four days.

Next, prepare a syrup by dissolving the kilogram of sugar in one litre of warm water. Combine this with the lemon-infused alcohol, mix everything together and leave it for about ten minutes.

Finally, filter the Limoncello and bottle it.

Or, as our tea towel memorably puts it, “put it in a sottle.”

Then comes an instruction requiring absolutely no translation whatsoever:

Drink Limoncello very cold.

That we can manage.

One important British kitchen note

The recipe's instruction to use a litre of “alcohol” needs some qualification. In Italy, very high-strength neutral food-grade spirit is commonly used for homemade Limoncello. Do not use industrial, rubbing, denatured or other non-food alcohol.

If suitable food-grade spirit isn't readily available, a strong vodka can be used, although the quantities of water and sugar may need adjusting because vodka is considerably weaker. Or you can use Everclear, a distilled grain alcohol spirit with no color, odour and without much of a taste, making ideal for producing Limoncello at home. 

And use unwaxed lemons if possible, since it's the peel we're after.

Who needs a cookery book?

I think we've become rather fond of our Limoncello tea towel. It is decorative, educational and unintentionally very funny.

Better still, if you splash Limoncello over this particular recipe, you don't have to panic about ruining your cookbook or mobile phone.

You simply put the instructions in the washing machine.

Now all we need is a tea towel explaining how to make the perfect Negroni…