No. 3713

Lemonade or with Syrup and Orangeade

Limonade, Limonade au Sirop et Orangeade

Lemonade.—Take a pint and a half of lemon juice and a pound and a half of sugar, add water to taste, add thin slices of lemon and serve very cold.

Lemonade with Syrup.—Ten gills of syrup at thirty-two degrees, one quart of lemon juice, the peel of one lemon and a quart of water; let the peel infuse, strain through a silk sieve and bring it to eleven degrees, syrup gauge (Fig. 167).

Orangeade.—Eight gills of syrup at thirty-two degrees, ten gills of lemon juice, the peel of two oranges, two and a half quarts of water, and the juice of four lemons; bring it to eleven degrees, syrup gauge, strain through a silk sieve and serve very cold.

← No. 3712 Claret Cup and Claret Cup a la Willard's The Wine Cellar, Punches & Drinks No. 3714 Champagne, Claret and Rum Punch; Dessert Dri →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three related drinks, written for a professional kitchen that kept a standing jar of sugar syrup and a hydrometer beside it. Translating the syrup measurements is most of the work.

GillsA gill is 4 fl oz, or half a cup. Ten gills is 5 cups (1 quart plus 1 cup); eight gills is 1 quart.
"Syrup at thirty-two degrees"This is degrees Baume, read on a syrup hydrometer (Ranhofer's Fig. 167). Thirty-two Baume is the heavy stock syrup of the French kitchen, in the region of 60 percent sugar by weight -- something like three parts sugar to two parts water. Eleven Baume is the finished drinking strength, about 20 percent sugar by weight, which is why so much water goes in.
Working without a hydrometerThe first version needs no gauge at all: 1.5 pints lemon juice, 1.5 lb sugar, water to taste. For the syrup versions, treat "bring it to eleven degrees" as an instruction to dilute and taste until the drink reads as lemonade rather than cordial.
The orangeade is mostly lemonIt takes 5 cups of lemon juice plus the juice of four more lemons, and gets its orange character only from the infused peel of two oranges. If you want an orange-forward drink, that is a different recipe; this one is a lemon drink perfumed with orange oil.
Infusing the peelPare the zest thin, with no white pith, and let it steep in the warm syrup rather than boil in it. Long boiling drives off the volatile oil that is the whole point of adding peel.
Silk sieveA fine-mesh strainer lined with a double layer of cheesecloth does the same job of catching zest, pulp and any sugar scum.
YieldEach version makes roughly three quarts to a gallon of finished drink once diluted, so figure twelve to twenty glasses. Scaling down by four gives a household batch.
Juice quantityA pint and a half of lemon juice is about 3 cups, which takes 12 to 18 lemons depending on size. Squeeze ahead and keep the juice cold; it dulls within a day.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the habits of a kitchen that worked at volume: a stock sugar syrup held at a known density, measured by a pese-sirop hydrometer on the Baume scale, so that any cook could hit the same sweetness in any drink without tasting his way there. The scale is generally traced to the French chemist Antoine Baume in the later eighteenth century, and it survived in confectionery and distilling long after it fell out of general use. In Ranhofer's book limonade and orangeade sit among claret cups and champagne punches as the temperate options on a banquet list, and the instruction to serve "very cold" mattered because ice, by the 1890s, was a commercial commodity that a Manhattan restaurant could take for granted.