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Lime and Mint Julep
Juice of 6 limes
1 pint water
½ teaspoon essence of
1 cup sugar peppermint
Mix sugar and water, boil five minutes; cool; add the lime juice and peppermint. Serve in glasses with cracked ice. Garnish with slice of lime and mint cherry.
A temperance julep: sugar syrup, lime juice and peppermint over cracked ice, with no spirit anywhere in it. The printed ingredient list has been scrambled into two columns by the original typesetting, so read it as juice of 6 limes, 1 pint water, 1 cup sugar, and ½ teaspoon essence of peppermint.
- Start with the peppermintEssence of peppermint is potent and the difference between refreshing and medicinal is a few drops. Add a quarter teaspoon of modern peppermint extract first, taste, and go up from there rather than committing the full half teaspoon to the whole batch.
- Essence of peppermintIn this period that meant peppermint oil dissolved in alcohol, sold as much for indigestion as for flavouring. Bottled peppermint extract is the direct descendant; pure peppermint oil is several times stronger and should not be substituted spoon for spoon.
- The syrupOne cup sugar to one pint water boiled five minutes is a light simple syrup, and the boiling is only to dissolve and to hold it a few days. Cool it completely before the lime goes in, or the juice loses its freshness.
- LimesSix limes gives roughly ¾ cup of juice with today's Persian limes. Older, smaller Key-type limes yielded less and were sharper, so taste and adjust the syrup rather than trusting the count.
- Mint cherryA maraschino-style cherry tinted green and flavoured with mint, a soda fountain and confectionery product; green mint cherries can still be found, though they are less familiar than the plain red sort. A plain maraschino cherry with a sprig of fresh mint does the same job.
- Cracked iceCracked, not cubed: the point of a julep is ice small enough to chill and dilute fast and frost the glass. Crush cubes in a clean towel with a rolling pin.
- YieldAbout three cups of finished drink before ice, so four to six small glasses. It can be mixed hours ahead and kept cold, but pour it over the ice at the last moment.
Julep came into English from Arabic julāb, itself from Persian gulāb, rosewater, and for centuries it meant a sweet syrup used to carry medicine. The mint julep of the American South narrowed it to spirit, sugar, mint and ice, but the older sense of a sweetened dosing syrup never quite disappeared, which is why peppermint essence, a standard bottle in the family medicine cupboard, sits so comfortably in this glass. Recipes like this one belong to a large body of American temperance drink writing in which the name of a cocktail survives while the liquor is quietly removed and citrus, syrup and cracked ice do the work. The green mint cherry that finishes it was a soda fountain product.