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Orangeade-in-a-Minute
Measure two or three tablespoons Orangeade Syrup into each glass. Add a little cracked ice, stir and fill with cold water. glass. Add a little cracked ice, stir and fill with cold water.
Add more Karo if liked sweeter.
A two-line assembly instruction that assumes you already have a jar of the book's Orangeade Syrup in the icebox. The syrup, not the drink, is where the work is.
- The syrup is the recipeThis entry only dilutes a concentrate made earlier in the book, sweetened with Karo (the last line assumes a jar of it is on hand). Without that jar there is nothing to measure into the glass.
- Why KaroThe syrup is named by brand, which points to a corn-syrup promotional booklet. Corn syrup also has a functional role: it resists crystallising, so a concentrate keeps its texture better than an all-sugar syrup.
- ProportionsTwo or three tablespoons of syrup in a tumbler of, say, 8 oz works out somewhere between about 1:4 and 1:7 syrup to water; the recipe does not specify the glass. Start at two and taste, since the recipe itself invites adding more if you want it sweeter.
- Cracked iceIce was chipped from a block with a pick, so the pieces were irregular and small and chilled fast. Cubes from a tray dilute more slowly; crushed or pebble ice is the closer match.
- Stir before fillingSyrup is heavier than water and sinks, and the recipe has you stir it with the ice before the water goes in.
- The duplicated line"glass. Add a little cracked ice, stir and fill with cold water" appears twice in the text as transmitted — a duplication artifact, not a second step.
- YieldOne glass per set of measurements. For a pitcher, figure about 1 cup of syrup to 6 cups of water and adjust.
Orangeade belongs to the long family of sweetened fruit drinks — lemonade, limeade, raspberry shrub — that a household kept as a bottled concentrate because fresh citrus was seasonal and expensive and refrigeration was a block of ice in a wooden chest. Corn syrup entered that tradition around the turn of the twentieth century, when American corn refiners began marketing it in tins for domestic use and, as here, publishing small recipe books to teach cooks what to do with it. Booklets of this kind are often said to have been distributed by grocers or by mail, and their contents follow a predictable shape: candy, puddings, cake icings, and drinks, all of them built on the sponsor's product. The appeal of this one is entirely that the difficult part was done days ago.