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Orangeade (Make syrup as for Lemonade)
Make syrup as for Lemonade. Sweeten orange juice with syrup, and dilute by pouring over crushed ice.
A two-line formula that assumes you already have a jar of sugar syrup on the shelf. Everything depends on the syrup and on the fruit, since no quantities are given.
- The syrupThe lemonade syrup referred to would have been a plain sugar syrup, sugar dissolved in water and brought briefly to the boil, then cooled; the recipe itself gives no proportions. Kept covered and cold it will last a week or two, and the reason for making it at all is that granulated sugar dissolves poorly in cold juice.
- Proportions to start fromThe recipe gives none. About 1 cup fresh orange juice, 2 to 3 tablespoons syrup and enough water or ice melt to bring it to 2 cups is a reasonable place to begin. Taste and adjust; oranges vary far more in sweetness than lemons.
- Balance the sweetnessOrange juice alone can taste flat. A tablespoon of lemon juice per cup of orange juice restores the edge without reading as lemonade.
- "Dilute by pouring over crushed ice"The ice is the water. Pour the sweetened juice over a tall glass packed with crushed ice and let it stand a minute so some melts; if you add water as well you will get something thin.
- Strain or notPress the juice and strain out pips and coarse membrane, but leave a little pulp. Bitterness comes from crushed pith and seeds rather than from the juice itself.
- YieldNo quantity is given; as written it reads as a single glass at a time. For a pitcher, work in multiples of a cup of juice and hold the ice back until serving so nothing sits watery.
Orangeade commonly appears in the beverage sections of nineteenth-century household books alongside lemonade, and is often written as a variation on it rather than as a recipe of its own, as here. Both belong to a family of "-ade" drinks built on a keeping syrup, which was a practical way to have sweetening ready to stir into cold liquid before reliable domestic refrigeration. Crushed ice implies a household with access to block ice. Such drinks also turn up in sickroom and children's cookery, which is part of why they appear in books concerned with wholesome plain fare.