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Utopia Lemonade
Rub the well-washed rinds of eight lemons over cubes of sugar until they have absorbed all the oil from them. Put them with enough more sugar to make two pounds into a large kettle and add the strained juice of one dozen lemons. Pour on one gallon of boiling water, and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Then strain through a jelly bag, and serve very cold. The beaten whites of four eggs will improve this lemonade.
Lemonade for 150 People The juice of five dozen lemons, one dozen oranges sliced, and one can of pineapple, or a fresh pineapple grated, and six pounds of sugar. Mix well, and let stand until ready to serve. Then add six gallons of water, and ice. The sugar and some water may be boiled to a syrup, and when cool, added to the fruit and juices.
Two lemonades in one entry: a small batch built on an oleo-saccharum, and a punch scaled for a crowd. The first is the more interesting technique and the one worth reading closely.
- The hinge: rubbing the rindsAbrading whole sugar cubes against the zest pulls the peel oil into the sugar, giving a lemonade with aroma as well as acid. Sugar cubes work because the hard edges act as a grater; if you use granulated sugar instead, muddle the zest and sugar together and let the mixture sit half an hour before adding liquid.
- Two pounds of sugarThat is roughly 4 1/2 cups of granulated sugar to one gallon of water and the juice of a dozen lemons. It is sweet by current taste. Dissolving only half and adjusting after the juice goes in is reasonable, since lemon acidity varies more than the recipe assumes.
- Twelve lemonsPeriod lemons may well have run smaller than today's supermarket fruit. A dozen modern lemons yield roughly 2 to 2 1/4 cups of juice, which is a sound proportion for a gallon of water.
- The jelly bagA cone of flannel or closely woven cotton, hung to drip. A double layer of cheesecloth or a fine chinois does the same work. The point is to remove pulp and zest fragments so the drink is clear.
- The beaten egg whitesThese are stirred in raw and never heated, so the finished lemonade carries the usual salmonella risk of uncooked egg. Omit them, or use pasteurized whites, if you are serving children, elderly guests or anyone pregnant. They contribute foam and body, not flavour.
- Canned pineappleIn the large-batch version, 'one can' probably means a tin in the 20-oz range, sliced or crushed, juice included; the recipe does not specify. Fresh grated pineapple is the stated alternative and gives a brighter result; there is no gelatin here, so its enzymes cause no trouble.
- The syrup variationBoiling the six pounds of sugar with some of the water and cooling it before mixing is the better route for a large batch. Undissolved sugar settles to the bottom of a punch bowl and the last servings come out cloyingly sweet.
- YieldThe first recipe makes a little over a gallon, about sixteen 8-oz servings. The second, at roughly six and a half gallons before ice, gives the 150 guests about 5 oz each, which is a single cup at a reception rather than a refill.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of temperance drink books published as national Prohibition approached, and its purpose was practical: to give hostesses something to put in a punch bowl that was neither alcoholic nor dull. That explains both the ambition of the recipes and the scale of them, since church suppers, lodge receptions and club gatherings were exactly the occasions where a punch had previously been fortified. The technique behind the first lemonade is older than the book by centuries. Rubbing sugar against citrus peel to capture the oil, now generally called an oleo-saccharum, is a foundation of English and colonial punch making, and its survival here in a teetotal manual shows how much of the punch tradition carried over once the spirits were removed.