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Quick Lemonade
Take the juice of two lemons and pour over four tablespoonfuls of sugar. When the sugar is thoroughly dissolved add one quart of water and cracked ice.
About as short as a recipe gets, and the proportions still hold up. A few points on scale and technique.
- YieldOne quart of water plus juice and ice makes about four 8-ounce glasses. Doubling is straightforward.
- Sugar quantityFour tablespoonfuls is a quarter cup — noticeably less sweet than modern commercial lemonade. Taste before you add ice and adjust upward if you want it closer to what you are used to.
- Dissolving the sugarThis is the hinge. Two lemons yield only about 5 tablespoons of juice, so granulated sugar dissolves slowly in it. Stir for a full minute, or warm the juice and sugar briefly, before the water goes in; otherwise the sugar settles at the bottom of the pitcher and the first glasses are sour and the last are syrupy.
- Lemon sizeLemons vary a good deal, so measure rather than count: aim for about 1/3 cup of juice per quart of water.
- Cracked iceIce commonly came in blocks and was broken up at home, which is likely why cracked ice is specified. Cubes work, but cracked or crushed ice chills faster and dilutes the drink more as it melts — start slightly stronger if you use it.
- Room-temperature waterThe recipe assumes the ice does the cooling. If you are making it ahead, use cold water and add the ice at serving so it does not water down in the pitcher.
This comes from a genre that flourished in the years around national Prohibition: collections of non-alcoholic drinks aimed at households and hostesses who needed something to serve that was not wine or punch. The title appears to play on "on the water wagon," the period phrase for abstaining from drink. Lemonade was the workhorse of such books — cheap, universally liked, and made from a fruit that by the 1910s was shipped in quantity from California and from Italy. The instruction to pour juice over sugar rather than making a syrup first marks this as the "quick" version; many books of the era also give a stock lemon syrup to be kept in the pantry and diluted as needed.