It appears that lemonade had its origin in the tenth century Egyptian peasantry. Although use of the lemonade itself originated much earlier, medieval Jewish communities in Cairo bottled lemon juice and sugar in a beverage known as qatarmizat, which was consumed locally and exported.
It has a history dating back to at least the thirteenth century, when Arab cookery books offered recipes for drinks made from lemon syrup.The earliest written recipes for lemonade, some flavored with fruits or herbs, appeared in Arabic, in a twelfth-century medical cookbook On Lemon, Its Drinking and Use. The author, Egyptian physician, Ibn Jumay’ the personal physician to the great Muslim leader Saladin.
The Mongols enjoyed a sweetened lemon drink preserved with alcohol, and the Persian enjoyed sharba, from which the English ‘sherbet’ derives.
By the mid-seventeenth century, the drink was popular in Europe when limonadiers, street vendors in France, sold lemonade at modest prices. Limonadiers dispensed the hugely popular beverage from metal tanks carried on their backs.
Lemonade arrived in America no later than the eighteenth century, imported from the various European cultures of immigrants.
Sunkist Growers, a citrus marketing cooperative, introduced frozen lemonade in the 1950s, promoting it as ‘the coolingest cooler of them all.’
History of lemonade