Pink Lemonade

Pink lemonade is an American drink whose invention is tied to two rival 19th-century circus legends rather than to a single documented creator. The best-known version traces it to Henry E. Allott, a Chicago-born circus concessionaire who ran off to join a traveling circus as a teenager in the early 1870s. As the story goes, he accidentally dropped red cinnamon candies into a tub of plain lemonade, tinting it pink, and sold it as a novelty rather than waste the batch. A 1912 New York Times obituary credited Allott with the invention.

A competing account, recorded in a circus memoir about lion tamer George Conklin, holds that Conklin's brother Pete invented the drink in 1857 while running a lemonade concession, improvising with a tub of tinted water after running out of clean supply. Because both tales come from circus-world sources decades after the fact, neither can be verified, and food historians treat the drink's origin as an unresolved piece of circus folklore. By the 1890s pink lemonade was already a fixture of circuses and fairs, with a colored version of the recipe appearing in print by 1892, well before it became a general American refreshment associated with summertime gatherings.