Home › Lemon and Lime › Limeade
Limeade
Fill glass half full of cracked ice, add the juice of three limes and one tablespoonful of sugar. Fill up glass with cold water or Apollinaris. Shake well, and serve with straws.
A three-line bar recipe that assumes a shaker, a saloon-sized ice pick and a bottled mineral water most Americans no longer keep. The details worth knowing:
- The hinge: dissolve the sugar firstGranulated sugar dissolves slowly and incompletely in ice water, and the sweetness can end up sitting at the bottom under the straws. Stir the sugar into the lime juice until it goes clear before any ice or water joins it, or use an equal volume of simple syrup.
- Glass sizeThe recipe does not say what size glass. Assume an ordinary tumbler; if it holds 10 to 12 oz and half of that is ice, the drink itself is about 5 to 6 oz of liquid — one serving.
- Three limesLimes of the period were generally the small West Indian or Key type, yielding perhaps a tablespoon of juice each. Three modern Persian limes give considerably more — enough to overwhelm one tablespoon of sugar. Start with 2 tablespoons of juice and adjust.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water, widely sold in the United States before the First World War and treated as the default fizzy mixer. Any dry sparkling mineral water or club soda stands in.
- Cracked, not cubedCracked ice originally meant ice broken from a block with a pick; at home, smash cubes under a towel with a rolling pin or the back of a heavy spoon. It chills and dilutes faster than whole cubes, which is the point in a drink built without spirits to carry it.
- Do not shake the sparkling versionShaking the sparkling version -- The recipe says to shake regardless of which liquid you use. If you use Apollinaris or soda, better to shake the juice, sugar and ice on their own, then top with the sparkling water and stir once.
This comes from a book of nonalcoholic drinks published while the temperance movement was pressing toward national Prohibition. Books of this kind took the working vocabulary of the saloon — cracked ice, shakers, straws, Apollinaris — and reassigned it to fruit juices and mineral waters, on the theory that abstainers wanted their refreshment to look and feel like a bar drink rather than a glass of lemonade. Limes reached American bars largely through the West Indies trade, and the lime-sugar-soda formula here is a temperance echo of the lime rickey, a drink recorded from its Washington origins as a spirits drink — whiskey, later gin — with lime and soda and no sugar.