Home › Ginger and Ginger Ale › Bronx Cooler
Bronx Cooler
Put in a glass pitcher the rind of one lemon, three lumps of ice, one bottle of ginger ale, and one bottle of sarsaparilla. When thoroughly chilled, serve in glasses decorated with pieces of mint.
A two-bottle punch that depends entirely on the quality of what you pour in. Nothing here is difficult; the only real decisions are the bottles and the temperature.
- What "one bottle" meantGinger ale and sarsaparilla were commonly sold in bottles of roughly 6 to 12 ounces in this period, so the whole pitcher would have held somewhere between about three-quarters of a pint and 1.5 pints. Two 12 oz bottles gives about three 8 oz servings; scale up in equal parts if you want a pitcher that looks like one.
- Sarsaparilla todayThe old bottled sarsaparilla was a sweet root-flavoured soda, closer to a light root beer than to anything medicinal. Modern root beer or a birch beer stands in well; the sassafras-heavy "sarsaparilla" sodas still sold are also fine, and no true sarsaparilla root is required.
- Pare the rind, don't zest itTake the lemon peel off in wide strips with a vegetable peeler and leave the white pith behind. Pith steeping in a cold sweet drink can turn it bitter over the time the pitcher needs to chill.
- Chill first, then iceThree lumps of ice in a room-temperature pitcher of soda will melt out and flatten the drink. Refrigerate both bottles cold, then add ice only to hold the temperature, or chill the pitcher itself and ice the serving glasses instead.
- Pour gentlyBoth components are carbonated and the recipe gives no stirring instruction. Tip the pitcher against the glass wall and skip the spoon; agitation is what makes the second glass taste tired.
- The mintSlap the sprigs once between your palms rather than chopping them. Bruising releases the oil into the air above the glass, which is where the mint does its work in a drink this lightly flavoured.
- TimingBest assembled no more than half an hour before serving. This is not a punch that improves standing; it loses fizz and picks up rind bitterness.
This comes from a wave of American drink books published in the years when the temperance movement was at full strength. Compilers of these books took the structure of the bar manual, the pitcher, the pared citrus rind, the ice, the mint garnish, and filled it with the bottled sodas that were then pouring out of new commercial plants. The Bronx Cooler shares its name with the Bronx cocktail, a mix of gin, orange juice and vermouth generally traced to New York bars around the turn of the twentieth century, though the name may equally point to the borough itself, and beyond the pitcher-and-mint presentation the two drinks have nothing in common. What the recipe really records is how quickly ginger ale and sarsaparilla went from druggist's counter to household staple, and how readily a hostess could set a pitcher on the table that looked like a cocktail and broke no pledge.