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Anniversary Cup
Add the strained juice of one lemon to two tablespoonfuls of strawberry juice. Sweeten with two teaspoonfuls of powdered sugar and put into a glass half filled with cracked ice. Shake well and add plain soda. Serve with straws.
A single-glass soda fountain drink from the era when "cup" meant a mixed drink served over ice. It comes together in about two minutes once you have the fruit juice.
- Strawberry juiceThis means pressed, strained raw berry juice, not syrup or bottled nectar. Mash about 4 oz of hulled ripe strawberries with a fork, let them sit ten minutes, and push them through a fine sieve; that should give you the two tablespoons needed.
- Powdered sugarPeriod powdered sugar is finely ground sugar, closest to today's superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar carries cornstarch, which will slightly cloud and thicken the drink; superfine dissolves cleanly in the cold acid.
- Sweetness is light by designTwo teaspoons against a whole lemon is tart. Taste before adding the soda and add another teaspoon if the fruit is underripe, but the drink is meant to read as sharp rather than syrupy.
- "Shake well"The recipe has you shake in the glass itself; a lidded jar or cocktail shaker is easier. Shake the lemon, fruit juice, sugar and ice together, and do not add the soda before shaking.
- Plain sodaUnflavored carbonated water, from a siphon in 1919, seltzer or club soda now. Fill to within an inch of the rim and stir once, gently, so the carbonation survives.
- Cracked iceIce broken to roughly hazelnut size, not crushed to snow. It chills fast without flooding the glass, which matters in a drink this small.
- YieldOne tall glass, roughly 8 to 10 oz once the soda is in. The fruit and lemon scale straight up for a crowd, but add the soda glass by glass.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of temperance drink books published as national Prohibition approached, and the title says the whole thing: to be "on the water wagon" was to have sworn off liquor. Its recipes borrow the vocabulary and the glassware of the bar without the spirits, which is why a soft drink is called a cup here, a term that in nineteenth-century usage meant a chilled wine or cider punch. The method is pure soda fountain, an American institution by the 1910s: fruit juice, lemon, sugar and carbonated water from a siphon, shaken over cracked ice and served with straws, which had become cheap and disposable after the paper drinking straw went into mass production in the late nineteenth century.