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Pomelo and Limeade
Use these fruit juices separately or in combination, adding carbonated water and sugar as liked.
A formula rather than a recipe: two juices, sweetener, fizz, in whatever proportion pleases. The only real decisions are which fruit the book means by "pomelo" and how the sugar is dissolved.
- What "pomelo" meantIn American fruit and citrus writing of this period pomelo usually means grapefruit, not the large thick-rinded Asian pummelo now sold under that name. If you use a true pummelo the juice is milder and much less bitter, so you will want less sugar.
- Sugar as syrupGranulated sugar dissolves slowly and often incompletely in cold juice, leaving grit at the bottom of the glass. It is easier to dissolve it in an equal weight of hot water first, cool the syrup, then sweeten to taste.
- A workable proportionFor a starting point, 3 parts grapefruit juice to 1 part lime juice, sweetened to taste, then diluted with an equal volume of carbonated water. Lime alone wants roughly twice its volume of water and about 1 tablespoon syrup per 2 tablespoons juice.
- Carbonated waterPlain seltzer or club soda; the period's "carbonated water" was unflavoured and unsweetened. Add it last, poured down the side of the glass over ice, or the fizz is lost in the stirring.
- Juice the limes shallowPressing limes hard extracts oil from the rind, which can add bitterness and an off note as the juice stands. Juice them just before serving and strain out the pulp.
- YieldTwo medium grapefruit and three limes give roughly a pint of juice, enough for four tall glasses once sweetened and diluted.
Citrus "ades" filled a specific niche in turn-of-the-century American households: cold, non-alcoholic, and made from fruit that shipped well by rail — grapefruit in this period being overwhelmingly a Florida crop. Grapefruit was the newcomer of the pair, still often printed as pomelo or pomelo grapefruit in the 1890s and 1900s while the naming settled. The instruction to add carbonated water reflects the spread of bottled seltzer and the soda fountain, which were making fizzy water increasingly familiar. That the book gives no proportions at all is characteristic of its genre, which assumed a cook who would taste and adjust.