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Hot Lime and Strawberry
Mix two tablespoonfuls of lime juice with one tablespoonful of strawberry juice and a spoonful of sugar. While stirring add hot water to fill glass. Hot lime and Orange Mix one tablespoonful each of lime juice and ginger syrup with two tablespoonfuls of orange syrup. Add hot water to fill glass.
Two hot citrus drinks run together in one paragraph — each makes a single glass, and both are essentially a fruit shrub finished with hot water rather than soda.
- Two recipes, not oneThe text sets a second drink, Hot Lime and Orange, immediately after the first with no break. Read the sentence beginning "Mix one tablespoonful each of lime juice and ginger syrup" as a separate recipe.
- Glass sizeThe recipe says only "to fill glass." A modest tumbler of roughly 6 oz keeps the lime assertive; a 12 oz mug will taste like flavoured water.
- "Strawberry juice"The recipe distinguishes juice from the syrups called for in the second drink, so read it as strained juice pressed from crushed ripe berries rather than thick bottled syrup. If you use a commercial strawberry syrup, cut or omit the added sugar.
- Ginger and orange syrupBoth would have been sweet fountain syrups, typically a sugar-and-water syrup flavoured with ginger or with orange. Commercial versions can be very sweet, so taste before committing to the full two tablespoons of orange syrup.
- "A spoonful of sugar"Genuinely ambiguous: the recipe measures everything else in tablespoonfuls but leaves this one unqualified, so it may mean either a teaspoon or a tablespoon. Start with a teaspoon and adjust, since lime juice varies a good deal in sharpness.
- Water temperatureUse water just off the boil rather than at a hard boil; fresh lime juice fares better for it. The recipe has you stir as you pour rather than steep.
- Lime juiceSqueeze it. Bottled lime juice tends to taste flat and slightly bitter when heated, and this drink has nothing else to hide it behind.
Hot citrus-and-syrup drinks like these are close kin to the older domestic shrub: an acid fruit juice, a sweet syrup, and hot water, served as much for a cold or a chilly evening as for pleasure. The reliance on bottled fruit syrups suggests a commercial rather than a farmhouse book: a soda fountain would have had ginger, orange, strawberry and a dozen other syrups standing in a row, ready to be combined with either carbonated or hot water depending on the season.