The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Tennessee · Drink

Lynchburg Lemonade

  • Easy
  • 10 min
  • roughly 1 of 4 for cost
  • Vegetarian
  • Vegan

bright · smoky · sweet-edged Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, wood-smoke running underneath, trailing gentle sweetness.

Ingredients

  • 45ml Tennessee whiskey (charcoal-mellowed: the Lincoln County process is what makes it Tennessee and not bourbon)
  • 30ml triple sec or orange liqueur
  • 30ml fresh lemon juice + 1 tsp sugar (or 30ml sour mix if honesty is off tonight)
  • 120ml lemon-lime soda, cold
  • Lots of ice, a tall glass, lemon wheel and a cherry; a porch strongly recommended

Equipment

Grill

The skills inside

Straining & passing through a sieve

The words inside

Bourbon, Rye & American WhiskeyThe Liqueur Shelf: Orange, Maraschino, Chartreuse & Friends

Allergen screen

Found: alcohol

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

  1. Shake whiskey, triple sec, lemon and sugar hard with ice.
  2. Strain into a tall glass packed with fresh ice.
  3. Top with the soda; one gentle stir: keep the sparkle.
  4. Lemon wheel, cherry, porch. Batch it in a pitcher for company: 1 part each of the first three, 4 of soda, stirred over a mountain of ice.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes

  • Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
  • Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
  • It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
  • The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
  • The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.

Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.

At the Table

The Pour
It is the pour
Also Right
Serve alongside something salty and fried
From the Taps
-
Zero-Proof
Already zero-proof unless you made it otherwise

This is the glass, not the plate: judge it on temperature, dilution, and balance, and let the food do the answering.

Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.

Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Lynchburg Lemonade Search YouTube: J. Kenji López-Alt on Lynchburg Lemonade A YouTube search for J. Kenji López-Alt and this dish. No affiliation.