Lemonade

Lemonade has a surprisingly long story, and its earliest roots lie in the medieval Middle East. Lemons spread westward from Asia over many centuries, and by around the eleventh century travellers in Egypt were recording a drink of lemon juice sweetened with sugar or honey, traded and bottled in Cairo. These early sweetened citrus drinks were valued as refreshment and as a tonic, and they travelled along the trade routes of the Mediterranean into Europe, carried by the same merchants who brought sugar and spices west.

By the seventeenth century, lemonade had become fashionable in Europe, nowhere more so than in Paris. In 1676 a company of lemonade sellers, the Compagnie de Limonadiers, was granted the right to sell the drink in the city, and vendors walked the streets with tanks on their backs, pouring cups of still, sweetened lemon water to thirsty Parisians. Lemonade spread to Britain and beyond in the same era, made by hand from lemons, sugar and water, and served at pleasure gardens, coffee houses and family tables.

The lemonade most of Britain knows today, clear and sparkling, owes everything to the discovery of carbonated water. In 1767 the English scientist Joseph Priestley found a way to infuse water with carbon dioxide, and within a few decades businessmen such as Johann Jacob Schweppe, who brought his mineral water business to London in the 1790s, were bottling fizzy drinks commercially. Sparkling lemonade followed in the nineteenth century, and by the Victorian era it was a fixture of British life, sold by local mineral water makers in towns across the country. It’s why, in Britain, “lemonade” means a clear, fizzy drink, while in America the word usually describes the still, cloudy, freshly squeezed version, and why Lemonade remains one of the most familiar soft drinks on British bars today, including our own here in Cornwall.