It’s Pimm’s o’Clock

If you are, like us, trying not to start drinking too early, despite the locked-down nature of our current lives? It’s 5 o’clock gone, so you’re not officially an alcoholic, even if you partake. A good old fashioned Pimm’s & Lemonade! Just the ticket old girl!

Of course we don’t BUY lemonade, good heavens! We get Cook to make it. Here’s all the stuff she tells me she needs to make 3 P&L:

3 lemons
2 oranges
1 unused cucumber (I already had 2 P&L, as you can see)
2 cans of Schweppes Soda (not Tonic!)
¼ Bottle of Pimm’s
180ml syrup
ice & 3 glasses

Let’s start with a simple syrup:

Simple Syrup

500g sugar
250ml water
peel of 1 lemon (see below)
peel of 1 orange (don’t throw the fruit away!!)

Put all into a saucepan and turn on the heat. Stir. From time to time. As soon as all the sugar has dissolved, turn off the heat and leave to infuse for 15 minutes or as long as you can manage to wait. This is a large amount of syrup and you’re not going to need even a tiny fraction of it, but you can use it for the next cocktail and the next and the next… It keeps in the chiller forever.

then we make…

Lemonade – this will make 3 Pimm’s; one for Chris, one for Eddie and one for Cook.

2 juicy lemons
1 juicy orange
enough syrup to get it to where you want it to be

This is actually the base for a lemonade, you’d need to add soda to get the actual lemonade, but we don’t do that now, because we want to preserve fizz! Squeeze the lemons and orange through a strainer into a jug. Add enough pf the syrup to get a sweet sour mix. The Pimm’s is slightly sweet, but balanced with bitterness. I personally like a touch of lemony acidity to balance my P&L. A lot depends on the acidity of the lemon and the sweetness of the orange, but I ended up with a 1:1 mix by volume. If that means anything to you.

Just so you know we’ll get there in the end.

Now we we ready to…

Build our Pimm’s & Lemonade (ingredients per glass)

lots of ice
1 slice of orange, cut into 2
1 slice of lemon, not cut into 2
4 slices of cucumber
1 stick of cucumber, skin on, seeds off
60 ml lemonade
60ml Pimm’s
soda to top up

I’m using a big glass so big, it’s makes you drunk in 2. It holds 420ml, which would be a long drink, if it wasn’t the first of the day.
Fill your glass ¾ full of ice. Add the slices of lemon, orange and cucumber and if it doesn’t go in properly, don’t worry, it’s go in alright by the end, as the actress said to the bishop.
If you can’t be bothered to measure, fill your glass 1/3 full of lemonade, then top it to 2/3 of the glass with Pimm’s. Top up with soda water and stir with your cucumber stick. I’m not going to say this…