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Hot Lemonade
Mix the juice of half a lemon with one tablespoonful of sugar. Fill up the glass with hot water.
A two-ingredient drink that lives or dies on temperature and glassware. A few notes on both.
- The glassThe recipe fixes no volume: it is the juice of half a lemon (about 1 tablespoon) and 1 tablespoon sugar to whatever the glass holds, so a larger glass gives a weaker, less sweet drink. Pour boiling water into a thin untempered glass and it may crack; use a heatproof glass or a mug, or warm the glass with hot tap water first.
- Dissolve firstStir the sugar into the juice until it is syrupy before the water goes in. Sugar dropped into a full glass of hot water settles as grit at the bottom and the last mouthful is cloying.
- Not boilingThe recipe says hot water, not boiling. Water straight off the boil scalds the drinker and does the fresh juice no favours; something short of the boil, in the region of 175F, is enough to keep the drink hot to the last sip.
- SweetnessOne tablespoon of sugar in 8 oz is noticeably sweet by current taste. Start with two teaspoons and adjust; honey works in the same quantity and suits the sore-throat use this drink usually gets.
- Fresh juice onlyHalf a lemon gives 1 to 1.5 tablespoons. Bottled juice tastes cooked once it is heated, which defeats the point of the drink.
- YieldOne glass. The recipe scales directly, but juice the lemons at the last moment rather than holding juice warm.
Hot lemonade had a double life, as a temperance drink and as a domestic remedy for chills and colds, and it appears in nineteenth-century household manuals under both headings, often with the instruction to drink it in bed. Hot toddy and hot whisky punch had the same shape — spirit, sugar, lemon, hot water — so a book like this could offer the drink minus the spirit and change almost nothing else. The medicinal reputation was mostly warmth and hydration rather than the vitamin C, which was not isolated until the late 1920s and named ascorbic acid in the early 1930s.