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Selzer Lemonade
Make a strong lemonade and when serving dilute with one-third the quantity of selzer. Shaved ice may be compressed into balls which resemble snowballs. Place one snowball in each glass when serving punch.
Barely a recipe by modern standards — more a serving note — but the proportions and the ice trick are worth pinning down.
- "Selzer" is seltzerPlain carbonated water, named for the German spa town of Niederselters. Use unflavoured sparkling water or club soda; tonic water and flavoured seltzers will fight the lemon.
- What "strong lemonade" means hereThe recipe gives no proportions, so this has to be reconstructed: roughly double-strength, say about 1 cup lemon juice and 1 cup sugar dissolved in 2 cups water rather than the larger volume of water a lemonade meant for drinking straight would take. It should taste too sharp and too sweet on its own.
- The dilution is ambiguous"Dilute with one-third the quantity" most naturally reads as 3 parts lemonade to 1 part seltzer, though it could also be read as a finished drink one-third seltzer. Start at 3:1 and add more seltzer to taste; the concentrate above will carry a 2:1 ratio comfortably.
- Add the seltzer last and coldChill both the lemonade base and the water thoroughly. Pour the seltzer down the side of the glass and stir once, if at all — every extra stir costs carbonation.
- The snowballsShaved ice, not crushed cubes, is what packs. Run ice through a shaved-ice machine or a blender's ice setting, then press handfuls firmly in the palm or in a small ice cream scoop and hold them in the freezer on a tray until service. They will melt fast in a carbonated drink and dilute it further, so keep the base on the strong side.
- Note the punch referenceThe last sentence shifts to punch, not lemonade. In a tall glass of seltzer lemonade a single small ball is enough; more and you are drinking meltwater.
- YieldThe base described above makes roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of concentrate, or about four to six tall glasses once the seltzer is in.
Seltzer takes its name from Niederselters in Hesse, whose naturally effervescent spring water was bottled and shipped across Europe — a trade generally traced to the spring's early documentation in the sixteenth century, though the export business developed later. The word had long since detached from the source and meant any charged water, drawn from a syphon or a druggist's fountain. Adding it to lemonade was the plainest of the soda-fountain drinks, and the American fountain was at its height around 1900 — a fixture of drugstores, hotels and, increasingly, well-equipped households that could buy syphon bottles by the case. The snowball garnish belongs to the same moment, shaved ice pressed into decorative shapes for the table.