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Lemonade (Boil two cups of sugar)
Boil two cups of sugar and four cups water until a rich syrup is formed. Add one cup lemon juice. Dilute with ice water. 2 cups sugar 2 cups water
This is a sugar-syrup lemonade of the old confectioner's type: a keeping syrup made in quantity, then diluted glass by glass. The printed ingredient tail contradicts the instructions, so read the body text and ignore the list.
- The contradiction in the textThe instructions call for two cups sugar to four cups water; the summary line beneath says two cups sugar to two cups water. Either makes usable syrup — the 1:2 is a light syrup, the 1:1 a heavier one — but the dilution at the end will need adjusting to taste, and the original gives no ratio for it.
- "A rich syrup"No thermometer stage is meant here. Boil only until the sugar is fully dissolved and the liquid has thickened slightly and turned glossy, roughly five to eight minutes at a simmer. Taken further it will begin to move toward candy stages and set thick when cold.
- Cool before the juice goes inAdd the lemon juice to syrup that is at least warm-to-hand, not boiling. Heat drives off the volatile oils and fresh top notes that make the drink taste of lemon rather than of sour sugar.
- One cup of lemon juiceThat is five to seven medium lemons. Roll and warm them slightly before juicing to get the full yield, and strain out pulp and seeds if the syrup is to be kept.
- DilutionStart at one part syrup to three parts ice water and adjust. Covered in the refrigerator the syrup should hold for a week or two, which is much of the point of making it this way.
- YieldAbout five cups of finished syrup, enough for roughly twenty cups of lemonade at the ratio above.
- Why it sits among the frozen dishesOn freezing it -- Undiluted, or cut with only a little water, a mixture of this kind is close in composition to a lemon water ice, and churned in an ice cream machine would freeze to a coarse, clean-tasting sherbet; syrup diluted for drinking carries too little sugar and will freeze hard.
Lemonade made from a boiled stock syrup rather than from sugar stirred into cold water was long-established commercial practice. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other house-brand cookbooks of the period it set its chocolate recipes within a general household volume. Water ices of this composition, sugar and water and an acid fruit juice with no dairy at all, were a common frozen course in American homes before mechanical refrigeration, since they wanted only ice, salt and a hand-cranked freezer.