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Orangeade
Make syrup as for Lemonade. Sweeten orange juice with syrup, and dilute by pouring over crushed ice.
Two lines of text that assume you have already read the lemonade entry a few pages earlier. Everything hinges on the syrup and on how much water the ice actually contributes.
- The syrup"Syrup as for Lemonade" means a boiled sugar syrup rather than sugar stirred into cold juice. The lemonade entry's own proportions and boiling time govern; a boiled syrup dissolves cleanly in cold liquid, whereas sugar stirred into cold juice dissolves slowly and can leave grit in the bottom of the glass.
- ProportionsNone are given. A workable starting point is 1 cup fresh orange juice, 1/4 to 1/3 cup syrup, and enough water to bring it to about 3 cups. Sweeten to taste before diluting, since the ice will thin the flavour as well as chill it.
- "Dilute by pouring over crushed ice"The melting ice is the water in this drink. If you use large cubes that barely melt, the result will be a sweet syrupy concentrate; crushed or shaved ice melts fast enough to do the diluting the recipe intends. Adding a little cold water outright is the safer modern reading.
- The orangesMarket oranges of the period were less uniform than today's graded navels and Valencias, and may well have been seedier and sharper. Taste the juice first and cut the syrup back if your fruit is very sweet.
- Strain or notA number of the book's beverage recipes call for straining. Passing the juice through a fine sieve removes pulp and membrane, which otherwise separate into a layer in the glass within minutes.
- YieldThe quantities above make roughly two tall glasses. Syrup keeps a couple of weeks refrigerated in a covered jar, which is one argument for making a batch rather than sweetening one glass at a time.
The -ade ending comes through French from a Romance suffix (ultimately Latin -ata) denoting a product or a made thing, and by the eighteenth century English had lemonade, orangeade and a small family of relatives built on the same pattern: fruit juice, sugar, water. Orangeade sits in the book's beverage chapter among the other fruit drinks and punches. Citrus arrived by rail from Florida and California in winter and was a treat rather than a staple, and iced drinks depended on the delivered block of ice in the icebox, chipped and crushed by hand as needed. Sweetened citrus water was also common sickroom fare, recommended when solid food was refused.