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Frozen Lemonade
Boil together for fourteen minutes two quarts of water and three cupfuls of granulated sugar. Remove from the fire, and when the syrup is about cold, add the juice of seven lemons, and freeze. ons.
A simple sugar syrup, acidulated and churned — essentially a lemon sorbet, though the period called it a frozen beverage and served it in glasses. Two details matter: keep the sugar in balance, and add the juice only after the syrup has cooled.
- Why the juice goes in coldBoiling drives off the volatile oils and fresh aromatics in lemon juice and leaves a flat, cooked flavor. The fourteen-minute boil is for the syrup alone; wait until it is at or near room temperature before the juice goes in, and chill thoroughly before freezing.
- The boil is a concentration stepFourteen minutes at a boil evaporates some of the two quarts, so the finished syrup is denser than the ingredient list suggests. How much it reduces depends on the pan and how hard it boils, so judge the syrup by eye and by taste rather than by a fixed volume.
- How much juice seven lemons isSeven modern lemons give about 1 to 1¼ cups of juice; taste before freezing. Strain out pulp and seeds unless you want them suspended in the ice.
- "Freeze" means churnThis would have gone into a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt, which aerates as it chills. An ice cream machine does the same job. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours for a granita texture.
- Sugar is structural hereThe sugar is what keeps the mixture scoopable rather than a solid block. Cutting it to modern taste will give you a lemon ice you cannot get a spoon into; reduce it only modestly, and expect a harder set.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 quarts frozen, enough for 10 to 12 small glasses. Serve with a spoon, as a between-course refresher or a hot-weather drink; period books generally placed frozen lemonade with beverages rather than desserts.
- The stray wordThe "ons." at the end is a printer's artifact, the tail of a broken line. Nothing is missing from the method.
Frozen lemonade sits at the point where a beverage and a dessert overlap, and late nineteenth-century American cookbooks placed it sometimes among drinks and sometimes among ices. Iced and frozen lemonades became practical for ordinary households only once commercial ice harvesting and delivery were widespread /an urban kitchen could count on ice for the icebox and enough left over to pack a freezer with rock salt by the 1890s. The hand-cranked freezer, in common domestic use from the mid-century onward, made churned ices a standard part of the summer entertaining repertoire, and lemon was an easy flavor to work with: shelf-stable fruit, sugar, water, no custard to curdle. Books of this period also list frozen punches and sherbets meant to be passed midway through a long dinner, a fashion generally traced to French service, and a frozen lemonade like this one served the same purpose at a fraction of the cost.