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Lemonade with Lime
The proper way to prepare this drink is to make a plain or soda lemonade, only in place of using the juice of a whole lemon substitute the juice of half a lime and half a lemon, or a small quantity of American Lime Juice may be substituted in any of these drinks in place of the fresh expressed juice.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you already know the house lemonade and simply swaps half the citrus. The blanks it leaves are the ones worth filling in.
- The base it assumesThe text does not restate the house lemonade, so the proportions have to be inferred. Fountain lemonades of the period were generally built from lemon juice, simple syrup and water over shaved ice; a "soda lemonade" is the same drink finished with carbonated water instead of still water. Any specific ounce figures are a modern reconstruction, not something this book supplies.
- American Lime JuiceThe capitalisation suggests a bottled commercial product rather than fresh juice, of the kind sold to fountains in bulk, though the book does not identify a maker. Preserved lime juice of the period was often kept with sulphite and would have tasted duller than fresh; modern bottled lime juice is the nearest equivalent.
- Syrup, not sugarFountain work generally relied on prepared syrup rather than granulated sugar, which dissolves poorly in a cold glass. The recipe does not specify a sweetener or a syrup strength; period fountain syrups were often heavier than the equal-parts simple syrup used today.
- IceShaved or cracked ice was usual at the fountain and dilutes faster than modern cubes. The recipe says nothing about ice or dilution, so any adjustment for cubes is a modern judgement call.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were written for the dispenser behind the counter, not the home cook, which is why so many entries read like this one: an amendment to a formula printed a page earlier. Lime lemonades depended on a supply of juice in a form suited to commercial work: barrelled and bottled juice that kept through a season and did not depend on the produce delivery. Bottled lime juice had already made its name at sea as an antiscorbutic before it became a flavouring. The instruction to substitute it "in any of these drinks" is the tell that this is a working manual: the operator is expected to know the base drinks cold and to vary them from whatever is on the shelf.