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Pineappleade
8 cups water 2 cups sugar 1 cup lemon juice 1 orange sliced thin 1 cup raw pineapple cubed 8 cups cracked ice Boil sugar with 2 cups of water, add fruit and lemon juice and chill. Mix in remaining water and cracked ice. Serves 12.
A straightforward summer punch built on a sugar syrup. Nothing here has changed much, but a few points make it work as intended.
- The syrup stepTwo cups of sugar and two cups of water boiled together makes a standard 1:1 simple syrup. Boil only until the sugar is fully dissolved and clear, about a minute; longer concentrates it and the drink turns cloying.
- Chill before the iceThe syrup and fruit must be cold before the remaining six cups of water and the ice go in. Adding ice to warm syrup melts it immediately and you lose the dilution the recipe accounts for.
- Raw pineappleFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme destroyed by heat; this is why fresh pineapple will not set gelatin. The recipe adds the fruit after the syrup comes off the boil, though it gives no reason for doing so. Cube it not long before mixing.
- Lemon juiceA cup is roughly five to eight lemons, depending on size. Squeeze it fresh; bottled juice reads flat against the sugar and the pineapple.
- Cracked iceCracked ice is coarser than crushed and finer than cubes -- cubes wrapped in a towel and hit with a rolling pin. The eight cups dilute the punch as they melt, so the mixture will taste sweeter at the moment of mixing than it does later.
- YieldServes 12 as written, which works out at appreciably more than a cup each. Serve promptly in a punch bowl or pitcher rather than holding it.
Fruit "ades" -- lemonade, orangeade, pineappleade -- were a staple of the American punch bowl, and cookbooks of the early twentieth century list them in quantity for receptions, church socials and warm-weather entertaining. Pineapple appears in these books more often than its tropical origin might suggest, canned Hawaiian pineapple having become widely available and inexpensive in the early decades of the century. The proportions here follow the usual pattern for a large-batch beverage: a cooked sugar syrup as the base, a sharp citrus juice for acid, sliced fruit for looks, and a great deal of ice doing double duty as chilling and dilution.