Home › At the Fountain › Hot Lemonade
Hot Lemonade
1. Squeeze half a lemon into a cup and add 1 or 2 teaspoonfuls of sugar; fill with hot water; twist peel of lemon over cup as some of the fine flavored oil will make the lemonade delicious. 2. About 4 cubes loaf sugar, about 15 drops soluble extract lemon, about 10 drops tropical fruit acid, hot water to fill cup.
Two routes to the same cup: one from real fruit, one from the fountain's bottled flavor kit. The first is worth making as written; the second is mostly of historical interest unless you keep flavoring extracts on hand.
- The twist is the pointSqueezed juice alone gives a thin, flat hot drink. The oil expressed from the peel over the surface carries most of what reads as "lemon" in the aroma, so do not skip it, and use an unwaxed fruit if you can.
- Cup sizeThe recipe specifies only a cup, likely something in the range of an ordinary 6 to 8 oz serving. Half a lemon yields roughly a tablespoon or so of juice, which suits that sort of volume; scale up if you are filling a 12 oz mug.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was sold in cones or hard cut cubes and broken to size, so cube size was not standard. Four cubes is on the order of 4 teaspoons, perhaps 15 g or so, which is in any case markedly sweeter than the 1 to 2 teaspoons of the first version.
- Soluble extract of lemonA fountain-trade lemon flavoring cut with alcohol and water so it would disperse in a cold drink rather than bead on the surface. Ordinary kitchen lemon extract is the nearest thing; 15 drops is well under a quarter teaspoon, so add cautiously.
- Tropical fruit acidNot a fruit at all; fountain "fruit acid" of this sort was generally a dilute solution of citric or tartaric acid, stocked to supply the sourness that flavoring extracts lack. A pinch of citric acid powder does much the same job; without some acid, version 2 tastes like sweet perfumed water.
- Water temperatureThe recipe says only "hot water". Hot rather than furiously boiling is the sensible reading, since very hot water drives off the volatile lemon oil you have just twisted over the cup.
- YieldEach numbered version makes one cup.
Soda fountains did brisk business in winter, and the trade manuals of the period include hot drinks to keep the marble counter earning through the cold months: hot lemonade, hot beef tea, hot chocolate, hot ginger. Hot lemonade in particular sat on the line between refreshment and remedy, and was commonly given for a cold or a chill long before anyone could say whether it helped. The two versions here show the whole logic of the fountain in miniature: the first uses a real lemon, the second reconstructs it from a bottle of soluble extract and a bottle of fruit acid, both standard stock supplied by the flavoring houses.