Is there anything more cooling and refreshing than a nice glass of lemonade.
It's probably why August 20th, one of the hotter days here in Los Angeles at least, is National Lemonade day
and to honor it I'll be making a 17th century French recipe for lemonade
this time on Drinking History.
So lemonade has lots of different variations and it's really good way to tell someone's palette
based on how they make it. How much sugar they put in versus you know how tart or sour they like it.
I tend to make mine really sweet because I don't really like sour things all that much but you know
to each their own, but today we'll be checking out the palette of La Varenne, one of the most famous
French chefs as we make his recipe for lemonade from the 1651 publication 'Le Cuisinier Francois."
"Take one pint of water, add to it a half pound of sugar, the juice of six lemons and two oranges,
the zest of one half lemon, and half an orange you have pressed. Mix the water well in two very
clean vessels, pouring it back and forth from one to the other several times, and strain through a white napkin."
Now honestly since lemons, oranges and sugar are all quite different than they were
400 years ago this is going to be more of an approximation of what La Varenne would have tasted
but I've never really let that stop me before, so let's just go ahead and make it.
What you'll need is: 1 quart or 1 liter of water. Now I know the recipe says a pint but at this time a French pint
was actually about two modern American pints so that's why we're using it and we can kind of
test that theory because in a 1653 translation into English they translate it as a quart.
Also at the time there were only 12 ounces instead of 16 in a pound so a half of a pound of sugar would
be about 6 ounces but a pound was actually quite variable depending on where you were in France so
it's really anyone's guess, but I am going with one cup or 200 grams of sugar.
Then six lemons and two oranges. Now you want to find the smallest lemons and oranges that you can. At the time they
varied in size but they did tend to be smaller than the ones that were in France that were
growing at places like Orangerie at Versailles but use whatever you got.
So first go ahead and cut all of your fruit. I'm thinking it's about time to sharpen my knives, that's what I'm doing tomorrow clearly.
Then we'll add all the sugar to the water. He says to do this before adding the juice,
so that's what we'll do. I doubt it'll matter but that's what we'll do. Give it a nice stir,
and then we will add all of the juice from our lemons. Now let me address something.
This is- okay we all have that thing that like we just can't learn no matter how many times, well okay
maybe we don't all have this, I have this. Some things I just i have to learn multiple times
whenever I take a lemon, or orange, or lime and put it into one of these
I do that. That is incorrect. I know that is incorrect and yet that's still how I do it.
It's supposed to go upside down but it just seems so unnatural to me
and when I did the guacamole recipe a few weeks ago I had many, many people say what are you doing
but you know that's what it was. So let's squeeze all of these in. Nobody's perfect.
Gives you a workout. Okay, now we are going to zest two of these
pre-squeezed rinds. One orange and one lemon, and that's going to be a pain.
I don't know why he's having me do it this way.
*sigh
My hand is just covered in orange juice now. do it beforehand,
nobody's going to know. You're less likely to get zest of YOU but we'll add the zest
of that orange in there and then we'll zest the lemon too, and let's stir all of that into here.
Looks more like orange juice at this point than lemonade
or orange aid I guess and then we're going to mix it more by pouring it back and forth.
And then finally we strain this through a white napkin.
Wish me luck and that I don't make a complete mess.
It's working all right. It's taking a while to strain so perfect time for some history. :)
Now the earliest evidence that we have for something like lemonade comes from Egypt around
the year 1000 when they made a lemon drink that was sweetened with dates. What's interesting is
that they even had something called sukkar wa-laymun musafirin, or sugar with lemon for travelers
and basically it's the first powdered lemonade, and in the 14th century cookbook 'Kantz Al-Fawa'id'
which is the text that we used a few weeks ago to make our hummus. There is a recipe for it which
has you spread out crushed sugar and then drip lemon juice on top until it can't absorb anymore.
Then you form it into a little cone and then it's dried.
"To use the sugar, pour some water in a vessel and dissolve in it as much of this sugar as you need.
For each pint of water use two ounces of this sugar."
It's kind of like Country Time lemonade long before Country Time lemonade,
which I don't really think tastes like lemonade but I used to love that stuff as a kid.
Lemonade in its current form likely started in France around the time that our recipe comes from.
The drink became incredibly popular in Paris and in 1676 those selling it on the street formed
the Compagnie de Limoadiers which was the union of lemonade sellers
and it's thought that these roving lemonade sellers
may have contributed to staving off an outbreak of plague in the late 1600s in Paris.
See while most of the country was ravaged by the disease. Paris seemed fairly immune
and some historians believe that it was because of all the lemon peels
that were on the streets at the time of Paris.
They would have contained the compounds limonene and linolue which are known
to kill flea larvae and are actually still used today in many pet shampoos.
Now we don't know that that's the reason that the plague you know didn't ravage the area at the time but couldn't hurt
and it seems that lemonade wasn't just a way to get rid of fleas but also a way to cure all sorts of ailments.
In many cookbooks of the time recipes that were designed for the convalescent or the sick sick included lemonade
and an 1887 article from the New York Sun relates a story of
"A lady whose husband had a severe cold recommended flaxseed lemonade. 'Huh!' he said, irasibly, a man can't have a
cold without everybody suggesting some food remedy I'll send for a doctor'.
So the doctor came charged the sick man two dollars for his visit and advised flaxseed lemonade."
The drink became wildly popular in the US at the time partly due to the Women's Christian Temperance Union whose slogan said
'Goodbye to liquor, here's to lemonade' and Lucy Hayes wife of the 19th President Rutherford B. Hayes,
was dubbed Lemonade Lucy by later generations for her devotion to the temperance movement.
Hayes even banned alcohol at all White House functions during his time in office though
probably rather than due to a love of lemonade it was to court the temperance movement at the time,
and though lemonade often found its way into cocktail books at the time
more as a temperance drink it also found its way into the more traditional cocktail recipes. Though
often the lemon juice was completely sidelined in favor of sherry.
Another interesting form of lemonade was the egg lemonade which took egg whites
and foamed them up and added them to lemonade to create kind of a fizzy drink,
perhaps it was America's answer to the fizzy lemonade that had been popular in England all the way back to the late 1700s.
Ever since Johann Schwepp of Schweppes fame took Joseph Priestley's
method for making carbonated water and bottled it for mass consumption.
One of the most famous fizzy lemonades in England is called r-whites and
they started in 1845 and they have one of the best lemonade commercials of all time.
It's called 'the secret lemonade drinker' and it features a man coming downstairs in the middle of the night
sneaking some lemonade and it features a song by Elvis Costello's father where Elvis Costello,
a rather young Elvis Costello, sings in the background and it's very, very catchy.
Now we can't discuss the history of lemonade without pondering the question
what is pink lemonade?
Well it's just that, it's lemonade dyed pink, no additional flavors. Though,
it's origin story has two possibilities neither of which is likely true, both involving circus performers.
One comes from a 1912 obituary of a circus performer named Henry Alcott who says that he had
dropped some cinnamon candies into lemonade at one point turning it pink and that's how it started.
I prefer the second story even though it's kind of gross.
Related by the lion tamer George Conklin, he claimed that in 1857 his brother Pete worked at a circus selling lemonade and would cry
"here's your ice cold lemonade made in the shade".
Well, one day he ran out of lemonade and he couldn't find a well for water to make more.
"He rushed all around the show for water but he could find none...
as a last resort he went into the dressing tent. Fannie Jamieson, one of the bareback riders,
had just finished wringing out a pair of pink tights. The color had run and left the water a deep pink.
Pete grabbed the tub of pink water and ran. It took only a minute to throw in some
of the tartaric acid and the pieces of lemon and then he began to call out
'Come quickly buy fine strawberry lemonade!'
That day his sales doubled and from then on no first class circus was without pink lemonade."
Gross and even though the story is entertaining it makes me really glad that our lemonade is not pink.
That said it is kind of orange, the orange really really overdoes it
but let's give it a shot. Now they wouldn't have probably used ice at the time. Iced drinks were
déclassé. I'll probably end up using ice if I like it, but to start off we'll go room temperature.
That's good.
It's definitely tart but it is also fairly sweet. I would have probably added even more sugar but
it is sweet enough for 99% of people out there. I promise it's really good,
you get a little bit of the orange but it's more of just kind of the sweetness of the orange that
kind of cuts through the lemon. It's not super orangey, it is definitely lemonade
and it's mighty fine. So that's our lemonade from 17th century France, not that hard to make and
frankly I might start adding oranges whenever I make lemonade.
So have some lemonade, follow me on instagram @ tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I'll see you next time
on Drinking History.
*drinks