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Gingerade
Bruise a quarter of a pound of ginger root and cover with two quarts of water for one hour. Strain through a jelly bag, add three pounds of loaf sugar to the juice, and boil for an hour. Skim. When cold add one ounce of citric acid, and bottle. To serve, take one tablespoonful of the syrup to a glass of water, and a quarter of a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda.
A ginger syrup that becomes a fizzy drink at the moment of serving, when the bicarbonate of soda meets the citric acid in the glass. That reaction is the whole point of the recipe, and it is the part most likely to go wrong.
- The hinge: acid and sodaThe syrup carries the citric acid; the bicarbonate goes into the glass, not the bottle. Stir the soda in last and drink promptly, or the carbon dioxide escapes and you are left with sweet flat ginger water.
- Hot water for the infusionThe recipe says only "cover with two quarts of water." Boiling water poured over the bruised root and left an hour draws far more flavor than cold; cold water for one hour extracts very little. Bruise the root hard with a mallet or the flat of a heavy knife first.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone, and granulated white sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight. Three pounds is about 6 3/4 cups.
- Boiling for an hourAn hour at a full boil will reduce two quarts a long way and can push the sugar toward crystallizing on cooling. Work at a bare simmer and judge by consistency rather than the clock: you want a pourable syrup, not a thread-stage candy.
- Jelly bagA jelly bag is a fine cloth strainer. A double layer of cheesecloth in a sieve, or a coffee filter for a very clear result, does the same job. Let it drip rather than squeezing if you want the syrup bright.
- Citric acidStill sold as sour salt in canning and brewing supplies. One ounce is roughly 2 tablespoons; add it only after the syrup is cold, as the recipe insists, since heat and acid together invert more sugar and darken the color.
- Bottling and keepingThis is a sugar syrup put into bottles with no sterilization step, and a household of the period would have kept it in a cool cellar. Refrigerate it and use it within a few weeks; discard at any sign of cloudiness, fizz in the bottle, or mold at the neck.
- Yield and strengthExpect somewhere near a quart of finished syrup, which is around sixty glasses at a tablespoon each. A tablespoon in a tall glass is a thin drink by modern taste; two is closer to a commercial ginger ale.
Books like this one belong to the temperance movement's practical wing, which understood that arguing against the saloon worked better if you could hand someone something else to drink. The title plays on the idiom of climbing onto the water wagon -- swearing off liquor -- and ginger drinks were a staple of the genre, having the bite and the fizz of something stronger without the alcohol. The soda-and-acid trick predates home carbonating equipment: before bottled ginger ale was cheap and everywhere, a household could make its own effervescence in the glass, the same chemistry that raised a saleratus biscuit. Much of the ginger in American kitchens arrived through the West Indies trade, and its reputation as a stomach settler is old enough that the medicinal and the merely refreshing were never entirely separate.