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Lemonade-in-a-Minute
Measure from two to three tablespoons of the Lemonade Syrup into each glass; add a little crushed ice and fill with cold water. Add more Karo if liked sweeter.
A two-line assembly instruction that depends entirely on a lemonade syrup made earlier in the book — a boiled sugar-and-corn-syrup base flavored with lemon juice and zest. Once you have the syrup, the drink itself is arithmetic.
- The missing half of the recipe"Lemonade Syrup" is a separate entry elsewhere in the book; this page does not tell us what goes into it. Any 1:1 lemon syrup will stand in — roughly equal parts strained lemon juice and light corn syrup or simple syrup, with a little grated zest steeped in and strained out.
- What Karo meant hereKaro was sold both light (white) and dark; the recipe does not say which, though light is the likelier reading for lemonade. Corn syrup is less sweet than sugar by weight and resists crystallizing, which is why a syrup made with it is slower to grain in the bottle.
- ProportionsTwo to three tablespoons of syrup per glass; the recipe does not say how large a glass. In a modern 12- or 16-ounce glass, scale up to four or five tablespoons or the drink will read as faintly lemon-flavored water.
- Crushed iceIn a book of this date, crushed ice would generally have been chipped or pounded from a block, so the pieces are irregular and melt fast, diluting as they go. Fill the glass with ice if you like, but then start at the higher end of the syrup range.
- Order of operationsSyrup first, then ice, then water — as written. Corn syrup is dense and will sit in a stubborn layer at the bottom if the glass is already full; stir hard or give it a brief shake before the ice goes in.
- YieldOne glass per the instruction. A pint of syrup is thirty-two tablespoons, so ten to sixteen glasses at the rate given.
This is a page from a manufacturer's cookbook — the kind of small promotional volume that corn syrup, cornstarch, gelatin and baking powder companies distributed by the hundreds of thousands in the first decades of the twentieth century. Karo appeared in the first years of the 1900s, and came to be associated with the Corn Products Refining Company, which was not itself formed until 1906; its recipe booklets worked hard to move corn syrup out of the pancake category and into every part of the meal: candies, cakes, canned fruit, and beverage syrups like this one. The pitch behind a lemonade syrup was practical rather than novel. Households had been keeping bottled fruit syrups for cold drinks well before commercial corn syrup existed, but corn syrup genuinely does resist crystallizing where a pure sugar syrup will grain in the bottle, so the claim in the title — a minute to a glass of lemonade, no boiling, no dissolving sugar — was a fair one, and it is also, conveniently, an argument for buying more Karo.