Home › Beverages and Cocktails › Lemonade
Lemonade
Juice 6 lemons 1 C sugar 2 quarts of water makes 10 glasses.
A church-supper formula written in shorthand: no method, just proportions. The one thing worth doing that the original omits is dissolving the sugar before it meets the ice.
- C means cup1 C is one cup, about 200 g of granulated sugar. Two quarts is 8 cups, or a little under 2 liters.
- YieldTen glasses means ten small ones — roughly 6 oz each, the size of a punch cup or a tumbler at a church luncheon. By modern glassware this is closer to six servings.
- Dissolve the sugar firstSugar stirred into cold water dissolves slowly and tends to settle at the bottom. Heat the sugar with a cup of the water until clear, cool it, then add the juice and the remaining water; or shake the sugar with the juice alone until it goes syrupy.
- Six lemons is variableOlder, smaller lemons may give less juice than large modern Eurekas, which can give well over a cup between six. Measure the juice and aim for about 1 cup to 8 cups of water, then adjust the sugar to taste.
- Ice is separate from the waterThe two quarts is the liquid, not the ice. If you pour this over a full pitcher of ice it will thin out as it melts — make it slightly strong if serving over ice, or chill the pitcher instead.
- Zest, if you want itRubbing a few strips of lemon peel with the sugar before dissolving draws out the oils and gives a fuller lemon flavor than juice alone. Strain the peel out before serving.
Lemonade of this kind — juice, sugar, cold water, no carbonation — is the older meaning of the word, and it was a common temperance drink at church and lodge gatherings well into the twentieth century. The compressed style, with quantities abbreviated to a line and no method at all, is typical of community fundraising cookbooks, whose contributors could assume every reader already knew what to do with a lemon.