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Lemonade Sirup
4 cups water. 2 cups sugar. Juice 6 lemons.
If rinds are good, wash and drop into boiling water. Let stand fifteen minutes. Boil all of the above into a sirup. Put hot in sterilized bottles, to be used for tea, lemonade and all drinks when this acid flavor is needed.
A concentrate rather than a drink: sugar, water and lemon juice cooked down to keep on hand. Mrs. Wilson's instructions compress several steps into a few lines, so a little unpacking helps.
- Read the order of workThe rind steeping comes first, not last. Wash the lemons, drop the rinds into the boiling water, and let them stand fifteen minutes before the rest is boiled. Mrs. Wilson does not say to remove them: her "boil all of the above" leaves them in, so pare away heavy pith first if you want to avoid bitterness.
- Juice, then heatSix lemons give roughly 1 cup of juice, though fruit varies widely. Mrs. Wilson boils juice, water and sugar together; if you want a fresher flavour you can add the juice near the end instead, but that is a departure from what she wrote.
- How far to boil"Boil all of the above into a sirup" means a light syrup, not a candy stage. The recipe gives no time; with four cups of water to two of sugar it needs long enough to dissolve the sugar and thicken slightly, and is better watched than timed.
- Sterilized bottlesHold bottles and caps in boiling water for ten minutes, and fill them while both syrup and glass are hot so the glass does not crack.
- Storage, which the original assumesHot-filled bottles of an acid sugar syrup were expected to keep in a cool cellar. Without a proper water-bath process this is not a shelf-stable preserve by current standards: refrigerate it and use within a month, or freeze it in portions.
- Yield and dilutionYield depends on how far you boil it down; unreduced, the mixture comes to something over six cups. Figure 2 to 3 tablespoons per glass topped with cold water or soda water, adjusted to taste; Mrs. Wilson names tea and lemonade among its uses.
Lemon syrups belong to a long line of household concentrates that predate reliable refrigeration and bottled soft drinks. Cooks kept a sweetened acid base ready so that lemonade, shrubs and flavoured teas could be made without cutting fresh fruit each time. Mrs. Wilson wrote for readers of the Philadelphia press in the years around the First World War, when sugar was subject to periodic scarcity, and a good deal of her advice turns on getting every usable part of an ingredient into the pot; the instruction to steep the rinds "if rinds are good" is exactly that habit, capturing the peel oil that carries most of a lemon's aroma rather than throwing it out with the shells.