Lemonade
1 lemon 1 cup boiling water 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 thin slice lemon Wash the lemon and cut a very thin slice from the middle. Put the sugar in a bowl, squeeze the juice in it, remove the seeds, add the boiling water; cover, and put on ice to cool. Strain, and serve in a glass. Cut half the slice of lemon into two pieces, and use as a garnish; or a few berries or slice of orange may be used.
A single-glass lemonade built on hot water rather than a syrup, which is what makes it work: the sugar dissolves completely instead of settling as grit in the bottom.
- YieldThis makes one glass, roughly 8 ounces before ice. Multiply straight up for a pitcher, allowing one lemon and two tablespoons sugar per cup of water.
- Why boiling waterThe hot water ensures the sugar dissolves fully in the juice. The recipe tells you to cover the bowl while it cools; keeping the aromatics in is the likeliest reason, though the book does not say.
- StrengthOne lemon to one cup of water is tart by modern standards. Note that the recipe chills the bowl on ice rather than adding ice to the glass, so nothing dilutes it; taste before serving and add water if it bites.
- "Put on ice"In a 1910s kitchen this meant the icebox. The refrigerator does the same job; an hour is plenty, or chill it fast in a bowl of ice water.
- StrainWorth doing even if you removed the seeds. Pulp left to sit in hot sweetened juice turns the drink cloudy and slightly bitter.
- Lemons then and nowSupermarket lemons are often larger than the fruit this book assumed. If yours is a big thick-skinned specimen, half of it may be enough.
- GarnishCut the wheel from the middle of the fruit before juicing, not after — a squeezed lemon will not give you a clean slice.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the run of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when meat conservation and vegetarian cookery briefly shared the same shelf, and its beverage chapter is written in the careful single-portion style of invalid cookery — one lemon, one cup, one glass, chilled and strained and garnished as if for a tray. Lemonade itself is old: the word comes through the French limonade, and the trade is generally traced to seventeenth-century Paris, where vendors of sweetened lemon drinks were organised into their own guild. What dates this version is not the drink but the method. Before bottled syrups and reliable refrigeration, the recipe dissolves sugar in boiling water and then sets the bowl on ice to get a clear, fully sweetened glass, and it directs the cook to cover it while it cools.