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Lemonade (Tablespoons lemon juice)
2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons sugar syrup 1 cup cold water Mix ingredients, add crushed ice, and serve ice-cold with straws.
A single-glass formula that assumes you keep sugar syrup on hand, as any household with a soda fountain habit did. The proportions are sound; the only thing missing is the syrup recipe.
- Sugar syrupPeriod cookbooks mean a simple syrup boiled from sugar and water and cooled; ratios vary from equal parts to two parts sugar to one water. The recipe does not say which, so either will work, with the sweeter syrup giving a sweeter glass.
- Why syrup and not sugarGranulated sugar dissolves slowly and grudgingly in cold water and tends to settle at the bottom of the glass. Pre-made syrup is what lets the drink be mixed and served at once.
- YieldOne tall glass; the liquid comes to about 10 ounces before the ice is added. Multiply straight up for a pitcher; the ice will dilute it as it sits, so err slightly strong.
- Lemon juiceTwo tablespoons is roughly the yield of one medium lemon. Bottled juice is noticeably flatter here since there are only three ingredients to hide behind.
- Crushed iceThe recipe wants crushed rather than cubed so the drink chills instantly and stays cold in a warm room. Cubes work but the drink arrives less cold and dilutes more slowly.
- AdjustingWith only two tablespoons of syrup to a cup of water, the glass may read tart if you are used to bottled lemonade. Taste before serving and add syrup by the teaspoon rather than remaking.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 under the name of Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most confectioner-sponsored cookbooks of the era it ranged well beyond its sponsor's product into general household cookery. A plain lemonade sits in the chafing dish section, an odd placement whose reasoning the book itself does not explain, though that chapter may have doubled as a guide to the sort of informal entertaining a chafing dish implied. The reliance on prepared sugar syrup rather than loose sugar has often been linked to the influence of the commercial soda fountain, though how far fountain practice shaped expectations in American households is harder to say.