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Lemonade Syrup
2 pounds brown sugar 6 lemons 1½ pints water 2 ounces tartaric acid.
Boil sugar and water to a thin syrup, then add lemon juice. Let boil a little, and while boiling add acid and remove from stove. Bottle when cold. Will keep well. For drinking purposes in hot weather, take 1 tablespoon to 1 glass of water. Sweeten to taste. - Mrs. A. J. Allen, Sr., Reids Mills, Ont. 4 oranges 3 lemons
A cordial syrup of the pre-refrigeration kind: acid and sugar do the preserving, and a spoonful in a glass of cold water stands in for fresh lemonade. A few points of translation.
- The stray line at the end"4 oranges 3 lemons" — has no place in this recipe and appears to be the opening of the next one, carried over in transcription. Ignore it; this syrup uses six lemons and nothing else.
- 1½ pintsThree cups by US measure; in an Imperial Canadian book nearer 3½–3¾ cups. Either works, since the syrup is boiled before bottling.
- Brown sugarBrown sugar of the period was generally a lighter, less refined sugar than today's dark muscovado; light brown or turbinado is the closer match. A dark, strongly molasses-flavoured sugar will dominate the lemon.
- "A thin syrup"The sugar fully dissolved and the liquid still thin and freely pourable when hot, not reduced to a thread. The book gives no temperature.
- Tartaric acidSold for winemaking and baking; it is not cream of tartar, which is potassium bitartrate and will not dissolve the same way. Two ounces to this volume gives a sharply sour concentrate — that sourness is the point, since it lets the diluted drink taste of lemon without more juice.
- Add the acid off the heat's mercyThe instruction to add the acid while boiling and remove at once matters: prolonged boiling after the juice goes in drives off the volatile oils that carry the lemon flavour.
- Bottling and keeping"Will keep well" meant a cool cellar and a corked bottle. This is not a canning recipe and has no processing step, so treat it as a refrigerator syrup: clean bottles, cold storage, a month or two. Discard if it goes cloudy or fizzes.
- YieldSomething over a quart, likely nearer 1½ quarts of syrup; at a tablespoon per glass, on the order of a hundred drinks. Halving the recipe is sensible for a household without a cellar.
Acid syrups like this one were the standard household answer to summer thirst in the decades before home refrigeration and commercial soft drinks: fortifying lemon juice with tartaric acid, a cheap crystalline acid then sold by every druggist and grocer, made a small quantity of fruit go a long way. Tartaric acid is recovered from the lees of winemaking, which is why it was abundant and inexpensive, and why it turns up in period recipes for everything from baking powder to "raspberry vinegar" and effervescing lemonade powders. The Five Roses Cook Book, assembled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, prints this one under its contributor's name and town — a reminder that its beverage chapter was less a professional formulary than a swapped collection of things that had already worked in somebody's kitchen.