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Peppermint Lemonade
To 2 quarts water, add the juice of four lemons, and sweeten with simple syrup to which has been added 5 drops oil of peppermint. Serve from a glass pitcher with ice and mint springs. Serves 8.
A soda-fountain style lemonade that depends entirely on restraint with the peppermint oil. Everything else is proportion and temperature.
- The hinge: measure the oilPeppermint oil is many times stronger than extract, and five drops flavors the full two quarts. Add it to the syrup rather than the pitcher so it disperses evenly, and taste before adding more — oil that is stirred straight into cold water beads on the surface and lands unevenly in the glass.
- Buy the right oilUse a food-grade peppermint oil sold for flavoring, not a pharmacy or aromatherapy bottle. If only peppermint extract is at hand, it is roughly a quarter the strength; start with about 1/4 teaspoon in the syrup and taste.
- Simple syrupEqual parts sugar and water by volume, heated only until clear, then cooled. About a cup of syrup suits two quarts of water and four lemons; the recipe leaves the amount to the cook, so sweeten in stages.
- LemonsFour modern lemons give roughly 3/4 cup of juice. Older varieties were often smaller and sharper, so judge by taste rather than count and top up if the drink reads flat.
- Add ice at the last momentTwo quarts plus a full pitcher of ice dilutes fast. Chill the lemonade in the refrigerator first and use large cubes, or the drink is watery by the second glass.
- Mint garnishSlap the mint sprigs against your palm before dropping them in — bruising releases aroma without the bitterness that comes from muddling. Spearmint is the usual garnish and reads cleaner than peppermint leaf against the oil.
- YieldEight glasses of about eight ounces each, as stated. Scaling up is straightforward, but scale the oil by careful drops rather than by fractions of a teaspoon.
Flavored lemonades were a staple of the soda-fountain and tearoom era, when druggists and hotel dining rooms kept essential oils -- peppermint, wintergreen, lemon, clove -- alongside their syrups, and a few drops turned a stock beverage into a house specialty. Peppermint oil was a pharmacy staple long before it was a kitchen one, sold as a carminative and a breath sweetener.