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Cherry-Lime
Fill a glass one third full of cracked ice, pour over four tablespoonfuls of cherry syrup and a teaspoonful of lime juice. Add a tablespoonful of grated pineapple and fill up the glass with Apollinaris. Add slices of fresh pineapple or orange.
A soda-fountain build rather than a cooked recipe: the only real technique is keeping everything cold and not stirring the fizz flat. A few of the branded and archaic elements need translating.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated German mineral water, still sold but not always easy to find. Any strongly carbonated mineral water or plain club soda works; the original was prized for its hard, brisk bubble rather than any flavour.
- Cherry syrupThis means fountain syrup: a heavy sweet syrup flavoured with cherry, not the thin cordials sold as drink mixers today. Maraschino jar syrup or a homemade cherry syrup is closer than a diet-style flavouring.
- QuantitiesFour tablespoons is a quarter cup of syrup, which is sweet by modern palates in a tumbler of ordinary size. Start with two or three tablespoons and taste before topping up, especially if your syrup is commercial and already sugar-forward.
- Lime juiceA teaspoon of fresh lime. Bottled juice is noticeably duller here, since with so few components the acid is doing all the balancing work.
- Grated pineappleFresh pineapple grated on a coarse box grater, pulp and juice together. Crushed canned pineapple, well drained, is the practical substitute; the point is texture suspended in the drink, not a smooth puree.
- Cracked iceIce broken into irregular shards, not cubes and not crushed to snow. It chills faster than cubes without watering the drink down the way finely crushed ice does. Wrap cubes in a towel and hit them with a rolling pin.
- AssemblyAdd the carbonated water last and pour it down the side of the glass against the ice, then give one gentle lift with a long spoon to lace the syrup through. Vigorous stirring kills the carbonation that carries the fruit aroma.
- YieldOne glass, roughly 8 to 10 oz. Serve with a straw and a long spoon, since the grated pineapple settles.
This belongs to the great American soda fountain, which by the 1910s had built a whole vocabulary of syrups, phosphates, and mineral waters that a good dispenser was expected to combine on demand. Apollinaris, bottled from a spring in the German Ahr valley and marketed in the English-speaking world as the "Queen of Table Waters," was the prestige carbonated water of the era, and calling for it by name signalled a drink several steps above ordinary soda water. Books of this kind multiplied as national prohibition approached, offering the bar's ceremony -- the tall glass, the cracked ice, the garnish of fresh fruit -- without the alcohol. The pineapple is worth noting too: fresh pineapple in a summer drink suggests a well-stocked fountain, at a period when the fruit was becoming more widely available on the mainland.