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Iced Orange Juice
Make a syrup of a cupful of sugar and three quarters of a cup of water. Boil for about ten minutes. When cold mix with a half pint of orange juice and the juice of one lemon. Pour in tumblers half filled with cracked ice, and add ice water or Appollinaris.
Orangeade No. 1 Put two tablespoonfuls of cracked ice in a glass with two teaspoonfuls of powdered sugar, and pour the juice of one orange over it. Fill up glass with any charged water.
Orangeade No. 2 Squeeze the juice of four oranges over four tablespoonfuls of sugar. Pour on a very little water and let stand for fifteen or twenty minutes. Add the juice of half a lemon. Strain, and serve with cracked ice and enough cold water to fill glasses.
Three variations on the same idea, moving from a cooked sugar syrup to a quick cold maceration. All are straightforward; the details worth knowing are the units and the branded water.
- Half a pint of orange juiceOne cup, or about four medium oranges. The lemon is there for acid balance, not flavour, so don't leave it out even if your oranges are tart.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water, widely sold in America before the First World War and still available in Europe. Any dry, strongly carbonated mineral water stands in; the point is bubbles and a mineral edge rather than sweetness.
- "Charged water"Period shorthand for artificially carbonated water — plain seltzer or soda water. Not tonic, which carries its own sugar and quinine.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this generally means finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud a clear drink.
- The syrup is the whole point of No. 1The syrup -- It belongs to the first recipe, not Orangeade No. 1, which sweetens with powdered sugar in the glass. Ten minutes at a boil gives a fairly heavy syrup; the recipe is explicit that it must be cold before it meets the juice.
- Strain, alwaysStrain -- Only Orangeade No. 2 says to strain, but all three benefit; it takes out pulp and membrane, which settle out and can taste bitter.
- Cracked iceIce broken small by hand, not cubes and not shaved. Wrap cubes in a towel and hit them with a rolling pin; the irregular pieces chill faster, which is the intent.
- YieldOrangeade No. 1 is explicitly a single glass. Neither of the others states a number; both refer only to filling 'glasses' — the first, once diluted, will stretch to several, and No. 2 uses four oranges for an unspecified number.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a distinct genre: the temperance drink book, published around the time American Prohibition was moving from a moral campaign toward federal law. Its business was to prove that a hostess could set a decent table without wine or spirits, and the strategy is visible here — cracked ice, syrups, citrus and charged water are exactly the bartender's materials and technique, minus the liquor. Apollinaris water, drawn from a spring in the German Ahr valley, was a fashionable mineral water of the period and appears in both cocktail manuals and temperance books of the 1900s and 1910s; calling for it by name signalled that a soft drink could be as considered as anything served in a hotel bar. The pattern of macerating juice on sugar and letting it stand, as in Orangeade No. 2, is older than the book and turns up in English and American receipt collections through the nineteenth century as one way to draw flavour from citrus without heat.