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Beverages: Lemonade
Sparkling Lemonade. 36 lemons, 3 pounds granulated sugar, 6 oranges, 1 pineapple, 1 box strawberries, 4 quarts carbonic water. of each glass.
Mint Ale.
Juice 5 lemons, 1½ cupfuls sugar, dozen stalks and leaves of bruised mint, 2 bottles ginger ale.
Mix the lemons and sugar together; when melted, place in a punch bowl with the bruised mint, and when the bowl has been half filled with cracked ice, add the ginger ale.
Chocolate Sirup.
To use in emergency for making cool drinks. 2 ounces Runkel's chocolate, 2 cupfuls boiling water, 2 pounds sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls McIlhenny's Mexican vanilla.
Put the chocolate in a double boiler and let it melt gradually, stirring occasionally. Add the sugar and water. When thoroughly dissolved, strain and add the vanilla. Bottle and keep in a cool place until wanted. A tablespoonful added to a BEVERAGES glass of iced water or charged water makes a delicious cool drink in a moment or two. Or pour a few spoonfuls of it in a cocktail glass over shaved ice and cover with sweetened whipped cream for an afternoon-tea delicacy. With boiling water and whipped cream it makes a cupful of hot chocolate without a moment's delay.
Old Colonial Mint Cup. 1 bunch fresh mint, 6 oranges, 2 lemons, ounce pulverized gum arabic, cupful cold water, 1 cupful sugar, Whites of 2 eggs.
Steep mint in sufficient hot water to extract the flavor, adding the juice of the oranges and lemons.
Dissolve over hot water the gum arabic, soaked in cold water for twenty minutes, add the sugar and cook until it spins a thread; pour this boiling hot upon the stiffly beaten whites of eggs, beating until cold and smooth. Stir in the strained mint flavoring and fruit juice. Dilute to the required strength with carbonated water and serve in tumblers containing finely cracked ice, garnishing each portion with lemon peel and sprigs of mint.
Lemonade. 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 quart water, cupful lemon juice.
Boil the sugar and water fifteen minutes, then add the fruit juice.
Cool and, if too strong, add a piece of ice to dilute it.
Ginger Punch. 2 cupfuls sugar, 2 quarts water, 1 pound Canton ginger, 1 cupful orange juice, 1 cupful lemon juice.
Pour the water over the sugar and add the ginger, which has been cut coarsely in a meat chopper. Boil for twenty minutes, add the fruit juice, and strain. Allow it to cool, then pour over a piece of ice in a punch bowl.
A cluster of soda-fountain era drinks, printed with the compression typical of turn-of-the-century household compendiums. Several fractions have dropped out of the text, so read the quantities with suspicion before you scale anything up.
- Missing fractionsThe original almost certainly read ½ cupful, ¼ ounce and so on in several places — "cupful lemon juice," "ounce pulverized gum arabic," "dozen stalks" of mint. Where no fraction survives, treat the amount as unknown rather than assuming one; the plain Lemonade in particular works with about ¾ to 1 cup of lemon juice to that quart of syrup, tasted as you go.
- Sparkling Lemonade is incompleteThe method has been lost entirely — only "of each glass" survives from the final line. Juice the 36 lemons and 6 oranges, sweeten with the sugar, add crushed pineapple and sliced strawberries, chill, and top each glass with the carbonated water at serving time. As written it is a fragment, not a procedure.
- Carbonic and charged waterBoth terms mean plain carbonated water — seltzer or club soda, whether drawn from a siphon or fountain or poured from a bottle.
- Runkel's chocolateRunkel Brothers sold unsweetened cake chocolate; use 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate. There is no preservative beyond the sugar, so refrigerate the bottle rather than trusting the book's "cool place."
- Canton gingerPreserved stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in stoneware jars. A pound of it is a lot of sugar on top of the two cups called for — if you substitute fresh ginger root, use about 6 oz and expect to sweeten less aggressively.
- Gum arabicPowdered acacia gum, still sold as a food stabilizer and in cocktail supply shops for making gum syrup. It gives body and helps hold the egg-white foam together; the drink works without it, just thinner.
- Thread stage"Cook until it spins a thread" is roughly 230–234°F on a candy thermometer. That is the temperature you want the syrup to hit before it goes onto the egg whites.
- The raw whites in the Mint CupPouring boiling syrup over beaten whites is the Italian meringue method and it heats them substantially, but not to a temperature you can verify. If you are serving anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites.
- A box of strawberriesA market box of the period held about a quart, roughly 1½ lb. Yields are large throughout: the Sparkling Lemonade is a party punch for 25 or more, the Ginger Punch fills a bowl for a dozen, and only the plain Lemonade is household-sized at about five cups of concentrate.
These drinks belong to the golden age of the American soda fountain and the temperance punch bowl, when a household with access to "charged water" could imitate the druggist's counter at home. The naming of brands in the middle of a recipe — Runkel's chocolate, McIlhenny's Mexican vanilla — is characteristic of household books of the 1900s and 1910s, when packaged goods were new enough to be worth specifying and manufacturers were happy to see themselves quoted. Gum arabic, now a specialist purchase, was then more readily at hand — a druggist's line as much as a kitchen staple — used to give syrups the weight and mouthfeel that soda-fountain customers expected; "gum syrup" survived on cocktail lists well into the twentieth century. The "Old Colonial" label attached to the mint cup is period marketing rather than history: mint juleps and mint-flavored punches are genuinely old, but egg-white foams stabilized with acacia gum and diluted with charged water are entirely of this era.