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Mint Lemonade
Boil one cup of sugar and six cups of water twenty minutes. Add one cup of mint leaves, bruised, and let stand until cool. When cold add the juice of three lemons. Serve with cracked ice and sprigs of mint.
A mint syrup thinned to drinking strength rather than a concentrate, so the proportions here are the finished glass. The only thing that needs watching is the twenty-minute boil.
- The twenty-minute boilTwenty minutes is far longer than needed to dissolve the sugar, so some reduction is presumably intended, though the recipe does not say so. How much you lose depends on the pan; covering it will keep the volume up and give a correspondingly weaker drink.
- Add mint off the heatThe recipe is explicit that the leaves go in after boiling and steep as the syrup cools. Mint boiled in the syrup turns grassy and slightly bitter, and the volatile oils that carry the fresh smell go off with the steam.
- A cup of mint leavesLoosely packed leaves stripped from the stems, about one good supermarket bunch or two. Bruise them with the flat of a knife or a muddler rather than chopping; cut edges bleed chlorophyll and cloud the drink.
- Strain before servingNothing in the original says to, but the steeped leaves go limp and black. Strain them out when the syrup is cold and reserve fresh sprigs for the glass.
- Three lemonsThree lemons give roughly 1/2 cup juice. Taste before serving; sweetness varies with how much water actually boiled away.
- Cracked iceIce of the period came in blocks and was broken up by hand, which is the likely sense of "cracked" here. Small irregular pieces chill fast and dilute as they melt.
- YieldRoughly five to six cups once boiled and juiced, depending on how much water is lost — four or five modest glasses over ice.
The slang phrase "on the water wagon" — to swear off drink — is generally traced to the horse-drawn wagons that sprinkled dusty American streets, the joke being that a man in earnest would sooner drink from one of those than touch liquor. Mint lemonade itself is older and plainer than the politics around it: sugar syrup, citrus and a garden herb. The cracked ice points to a period when ice was bought in blocks and chipped by hand.