Home › Fruit Drinks and Cider › Cherry Flip
Cherry Flip
Add the juice of half a lemon to three tablespoonfuls of cherry syrup and half a glass of carbonated water. Stir well and strain into a tall glass. Stir in a pinch of bicarbonate of soda and fill up with carbonated water using the syphon.
A soda-fountain drink built in the glass, and one that depends on a small acid-base reaction for its foam. Everything here is straightforward except the vague glassware and the syrup itself.
- "Half a glass"The recipe never states a size. A fountain glass of the period was commonly somewhere around 8 to 10 ounces, which would make half a glass roughly 4 ounces of carbonated water; the "tall glass" is presumably larger again, filled the rest of the way from the siphon.
- Cherry syrupThis means fountain syrup — a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with cherry, closer to a modern snow-cone or Italian soda syrup than to fruit juice. Three tablespoons of unsweetened cherry juice will taste thin and sour against the lemon.
- The bicarbonate is the pointAdded to the acidic lemon and syrup, a pinch of baking soda foams immediately. Add it last, after straining, and pour the finishing water over it at once; if it sits, the fizz is gone and only a faint salty-soapy note remains.
- Keep the pinch smallAn eighth of a teaspoon is plenty for a tall glass. More does not make more foam of any lasting kind, and bicarbonate tastes distinctly alkaline once it is past that point.
- StrainingStraining removes lemon pips and pulp so the drink stays clear and the bubbles have nothing to cling to. Worth doing; a fine sieve will serve.
- Siphon substituteA siphon delivers water under pressure, which is what agitates the mixture. Chilled bottled sparkling water poured hard down the centre of the glass works; a soda maker's carbonated water works better.
- YieldOne tall glass. Serve at once, without stirring after the final fill, and without ice unless the glass is unchilled.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of books published as national prohibition approached: collections of soft drinks meant to prove that a host could still offer something interesting in a glass. Its recipes appear to draw on the American soda fountain, which by the 1910s was a highly developed trade with its own syrups, siphons and vocabulary. The name flip is the giveaway — a flip was traditionally a spirituous drink, often thickened with egg and warmed with a hot iron, and a fountain flip was also often made with egg. Here the word survives with neither liquor nor egg, the foam supplied instead by a pinch of bicarbonate hitting lemon juice. Borrowing the old bar names for temperance drinks seems to have been a familiar habit in books of this kind, and it tells you what the reader was being consoled for.