Lemonade: Encyclopedia II - Lemonade - North America

Lemonade - North America

An approximate recipe for U.S. and Canadian lemonade is to mix equal volumes of lemon juice and sugar and add water to taste, approximately four times as much water as lemon juice. About three quarters the volume of sugar is likely to be better to the taste of most people. It is traditionally served cold, preferably with ice.

In many upscale supermarkets, tall bottles of supposedly European lemonade can be purchased. These are always carbonated or “sparkling.” Often, these are translucent yellow, more like North American lemonade, though there are occasionally transparent and pink varieties as well.

A pink lemonade variation can be produced by adding red food coloring or grenadine syrup. Traditionally, beet juice provided the pink color; so little is needed that the flavor of the drink remains largely unchanged. This beverage may have originated as a replacement for "Indian lemonade," a cold infusion of red sumac berries, sometimes sweetened with maple sugar. Sumac beverages have a taste and appearance similar to pink lemonade, and were popular with Native Americans and early European settlers. A popular urban legend about pink lemonade is that it was first made when a circus owner could only find one source of water to make lemonade: that which the clowns used to wash off their make-up.

While mint, borage, lavender, and even alcohol can be added to lemonade without changing its name in American parlance, the term is more specific in the U.S. than in some of the countries listed above. Substituting limes or oranges for lemons produces limeade or orangeade, respectively. Sweet tea, the Southern variant of iced tea, is often mixed with lemonade (referred to as "half and half"). Any bottled beverage with any amount of tea is labelled "iced tea", no matter how close it may be to lemonade.

In the US, it is most common for children and teenagers to sell lemonade on the streets. A lot of young people in the US start "lemonade businesses" as a young child. For an adult, however, it is only sold in stores, although on one episode of The Apprentice, the first task was to sell lemonade on the streets of New York City in the traditional style of children. In the first task in the first season, the men were shocked, and disturbed, when they were told that their first task would be selling lemonade, while the women celebrated, because they knew that since lemonade is sold more often by little girls than little boys, the ladies (although adults) would (still) win. However, with the ladies all-grown up (some were in their 30s and even 40s), they had to sex it up by using the promises of kisses to sell lemonade for five dollars a glass, but the men would be viewed as "gay" if they did the same thing, so they would undoubtedly lose (in fact, the men lost four times in a row!). To try to prevent them from losing, one of the men tried make an offer with a customer, saying that if he or she bought a single galss of lemonade for $1000, they would get to meet Donald Trump, the host of The Apprentice, but that trick did not work; they still lost anyway. It would also be very likely that the phone numbers of the Apprentice ladies were written on the back of the napkins. Later on, the men made a $1200 profit, but the women made about four times as much of a profit, forcing the men to face Donald Trump in the boardroom, where one of them would be "fired" after losing a very weird Apprentice task.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "North America", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki