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Lemonade (Cup lemon juice pint water)
1 cup sugar. 1/3 cup lemon juice 1 pint water Make syrup by boiling sugar and water twelve minutes; add fruit juice, cool, and dilute with ice-water to suit individual tastes. Lemon syrup may be bottled and kept on hand to use as needed.
A syrup-based lemonade rather than a stir-and-hope one, which is why it dissolves properly and keeps. The text as printed has lost part of its ingredient list, so read the proportions with care.
- Missing sugar quantityThe instructions call for boiling sugar and water, but no sugar amount survives in this transcription. Period syrup proportions vary widely, from well under to well over equal parts sugar and water; if you take equal parts as a starting point, a pint of water would need about two cups of sugar. That is a guess for the cook's convenience, not the book's own figure.
- What the pint is forThe pint of water is the syrup water, boiled with the sugar, not the finished drink. The dilution happens afterward with ice-water, to taste.
- Twelve minutes of boilingThat length reduces the syrup noticeably and produces something thicker and sweeter than a modern 1:1 simple syrup, which is usually just heated until clear. If you want a syrup that measures predictably, stop when the sugar has dissolved; if you follow the twelve minutes, expect to use less of it per glass.
- Lemon juiceA third of a cup is about the yield of two large lemons. Add it off the heat as directed — boiling drives off the volatile oils and leaves a flat, cooked note.
- Keeping the syrupThe suggestion to bottle it holds up, but the acid and sugar are not a preservative at this dilution once it has been opened and dipped into. Refrigerate it and use within about two weeks; discard at any sign of cloudiness or fermentation.
- Cool before dilutingChilling the syrup first matters more than it sounds — hot syrup poured over ice melts it and you lose control of the strength entirely.
Lemonade of this kind belongs to the era when many households kept sweetened syrups and fruit shrubs bottled in the pantry, ready to be turned into a cold drink for callers, invalids or a summer afternoon. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book places it among beverages that also include fruit punches, effervescent drinks and barley water, and the logic is consistent throughout: make a strong flavored base once, keep it cool, and dilute as needed rather than sweetening glass by glass. Boiling sugar with water to a syrup was the standard fix for the problem every cook knows, that granulated sugar will not dissolve properly in cold liquid. The habit long predates the book: lemonade was served in taverns in Europe by the seventeenth century, and bottled lemon syrup has a long European household and confectioner's history as well, before commercial soft drinks and reliable home refrigeration arrived.