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
