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Soda or Apollinaris Lemonade
Juice of 1 lemon 2 tablespoons sugar 1/4 teaspoon soda 3/4 cup cold water Prepare the lemonade, cool, and add the soda, stirring thoroughly. Or Apollinaris water may be used instead of the water and soda.
A single glass of fizzy lemonade made the old way, by dosing a still lemonade with bicarbonate at the last moment. Two versions are given in three lines; the second is the one most people will prefer.
- "Soda" means bicarbonate of sodaThis is baking soda, not soda water. A quarter teaspoon dropped into acidic lemon juice releases carbon dioxide, which is the whole point of the first version.
- Add it last, drink at onceThe fizz is a one-time reaction, not dissolved carbonation under pressure. Stir the soda in at the glass and serve immediately; five minutes later it is flat lemonade with a faintly soapy edge.
- It will not taste like seltzer lemonadeThe bicarbonate neutralises part of the citric acid as it reacts, so the drink loses sharpness and picks up a mild salty-alkaline note. Drinks of this kind were often taken as a settling draught, but a modern palate expecting sparkling lemonade will find it dull.
- SodiumA quarter teaspoon of baking soda carries roughly 300 mg of sodium. Worth knowing if you are drinking several, or watching salt intake.
- Apollinaris waterA naturally carbonated German mineral water from the Ahr valley, sold worldwide in the period and still produced. Any sparkling mineral water substitutes directly; use it in place of both the water and the soda, and keep it very cold.
- Dissolve the sugar firstTwo tablespoons of granulated sugar dissolves slowly in cold water. The recipe's order ('prepare the lemonade, cool') suggests mixing it with the lemon juice and water at room temperature, or using a simple syrup, then chilling.
- YieldOne glass, about 7 fl oz before ice. Multiply as needed, but mix the soda into each glass separately rather than into a pitcher.
Apollinaris was one of the great branded mineral waters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bottled at a spring at Bad Neuenahr in the Ahr valley and marketed in Britain and America as the "Queen of Table Waters"; that a cookbook could name it without explanation suggests how far it had penetrated middle-class households. The bicarbonate version belongs to an older and more domestic tradition, in which effervescing draughts of lemon juice and soda were prepared at home as a mild remedy for indigestion and for feeding the sick. Non-alcoholic drinks were a standing feature of such collections, and cookery of the period commonly took an interest in invalid and convalescent diet.