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Fruit Lemonade
Add a few halved strawberries, whole raspberries, a little sliced pineapple or some pitted cherries to each glass of Lemonade.
This is a garnish instruction rather than a full formula: it assumes you already have a pitcher of plain lemonade on hand. A few notes on filling in the gaps.
- The base is assumedPeriod lemonade recipes commonly run to something like the juice of one lemon and one to two tablespoons of sugar per glass, topped with cold water and ice, though this page gives no formula of its own. Dissolve the sugar in a little hot water first, or make a simple syrup, so it does not settle in a gritty layer at the bottom.
- Glass sizeTumblers of the period varied, but 8 ounces or so is a fair working assumption. Two to three tablespoons of prepared fruit per glass works well; more and the drink becomes a fruit cup that needs a spoon.
- PineappleMost likely fresh pineapple, sliced and then cut into pieces small enough to pass a straw or sit politely at the bottom, though tinned pineapple was also on sale by this date. Canned pineapple in syrup will sweeten the drink noticeably, so cut the sugar in the lemonade if you use it.
- CherriesPitted sour or sweet cherries, not the bright red dyed cocktail cherries sold today, which are a later product and will bleed colour through the glass.
- Let it standTen to fifteen minutes in the refrigerator before serving lets the fruit give up some juice and colour. Much longer and strawberries in particular go pale and slack.
- IceAdd ice last. Fruit added to a glass already packed with ice tends to lodge at the top and never mingle.
- YieldA quart of lemonade fills four tumblers; a pint of mixed berries is ample for that many.
Fruit-garnished lemonade is often associated with the era when luncheon was a distinct meal with its own light, unfortified drinks, though the picture of a wineless midday table set for women and children is more a generalisation about household practice than a documented rule. Lemonade itself had been common in England and America since the eighteenth century, and domestic iceboxes and cheap commercial ice spread in the later nineteenth century, which made a chilled drink an everyday possibility rather than a luxury; whether the practice of dropping whole berries and cut fruit into the glass followed from that is not established here. The particular fruits named here are all high summer produce, which places the recipe firmly in the season when lemonade was drunk and when strawberries, raspberries and cherries came to market together. Instructions of this kind, offering a variation on something the reader is presumed to know already, are typical of household manuals, which assumed a base of common knowledge and printed only the refinements.