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Sherbet Lemonade
Put into a pitcher six lemons peeled and sliced very thin, with alternate layers of sugar. Chill thoroughly in ice box and when ready to serve add a quart of ice water and a big piece of ice.
A maceration drink rather than a mixed one: sugar draws juice out of the sliced fruit over several hours, so the only real variables are sugar quantity and resting time, neither of which the original states.
- Sugar, unstatedSix lemons layered with sugar wants roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar for a quart of water. Less and the finished pitcher is bracingly sour; the sugar is also doing the extraction work, so skimping shortens the yield of juice.
- Give it time"Chill thoroughly" is the hinge. Give the sugar a few hours, and overnight does no harm, to draw the juice out of the slices. Adding water after twenty minutes gives sweetened water with lemon floating in it.
- Peeled means peeledRemove the yellow rind and as much white pith as you can before slicing. Left on, the pith can turn the standing syrup bitter over a long chill.
- Ice boxThe refrigerator. In 1919 this meant an insulated chest cooled by a block of delivered ice, running warmer than a modern fridge; nothing changes in practice except that your result will be colder.
- The big piece of iceA single large block or a few oversized cubes, not a scoop of small ice. The point is slow dilution over the course of serving, and it still works better than crushed ice.
- Strain or notThe book leaves the slices in the pitcher. If it is going to sit on a table for an hour or more, lift out the spent slices when you add the water, or the drink keeps sweetening and softening as they collapse.
- YieldA quart of water plus juice and ice serves four to six tumblers.
The title of the book is the joke: On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon, a collection of soft drinks published by G. P. Putnam's Sons at the end of the 1910s, arrived as national Prohibition was closing in and "on the water wagon" was everyday slang for having given up liquor. Books of this kind sold on the premise that a temperate household still needed something to hand guests, and lemonade in its many forms carried most of that burden. The "sherbet" here has nothing to do with frozen dessert; it descends from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, a word that reached English through Ottoman Turkish and that came to be used in America for sugared fruit coolers. Layering fruit with sugar and letting it stand — much like a fruit shrub base — was one common way to get flavour out of citrus before anyone owned an electric juicer.