Lemonade
Roll six lemons well, slice thin in an earthen vessel, put over them two tea-cups white sugar; let stand fifteen minutes, add one gallon water and lumps of ice, pour into pitcher and serve. add soda after the glasses are filled, and stir rapidly for "sparkling lemonade."
Some
A whole-lemon infusion rather than a juiced one: the sliced peel gives the oils, the sugar draws out both juice and rind flavor. The fifteen-minute macerate is the whole method.
- Two tea-cups sugarA nineteenth-century teacup is usually reckoned somewhere between about 2/3 cup and a half-pint, so call it roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups sugar for a gallon of water. That is on the sweet side of modern taste; start with a cup and adjust after the water goes in.
- Roll the lemonsRolling them firmly on the counter, or briefly warming them, breaks down the membranes so the slices give up their juice during the short macerate. Skipping it leaves the drink thin.
- Slice thin, and mind the pithBecause the peel steeps in sugar and then sits in water with ice, bitterness builds. Fifteen minutes in sugar is right; do not let the sliced lemons stand in the finished gallon for an hour or the whole pitcher turns bitter.
- "An earthen vessel"Glazed earthenware or stoneware. The book gives no reason, but unlined copper, tin and cast iron do react with citrus acid, which is the likely point. Any glass, stainless or ceramic bowl does the job now.
- "Add soda"Genuinely ambiguous in this period. It most likely means a pinch of bicarbonate of soda stirred into each glass, which fizzes on contact with the acid and leaves a faint saline taste; it may also mean bottled soda water. Charged water in the glass gives a cleaner result.
- YieldA gallon plus ice serves about twelve to sixteen glasses. Six lemons for a gallon is modest by current standards, and the drink is meant to be poured over a good deal of ice rather than sipped neat.
- The unfinished lineThe text as given trails off at "Some", almost certainly the beginning of a following line that has been cut off rather than anything missing from the method above.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) grew out of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Book, compiled by the ladies of the First Congregational Church of Marysville, Ohio, a community whose temperance leanings show in a Drinks section that leans hard on lemonades, shrubs, ginger beers and coffee. Lemons were a reliable if not cheap grocery item in the Midwest by the 1870s, moving inland by rail from Gulf and Mediterranean shipments, and lemonade by the gallon was a common sight at church socials. The "sparkling" trick with soda reflects the era's fascination with the soda fountain, which had spread through American drugstores in the decades before this book: a pinch of bicarbonate hitting citric acid gave a household imitation of the charged water a druggist sold by the glass.