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Fruit Delight
Mix well one and one half tablespoonfuls each of strawberry, raspberry, and orange syrups, and the juice of half a lemon. Put into a glass half filled with cracked ice and fill up with any charged water. Decorate with fresh fruit and serve with straws.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: three fruit syrups, acid, ice, and carbonation, assembled in the glass. The proportions are small because it is built to fill one 8- to 10-ounce soda glass.
- The syrupsFountain syrups of the period were heavy sugar syrups, often around two parts sugar to one of water, flavoured with fruit juice or extract, not the thin bottled cordials sold today. Modern Italian-style soda syrups are close enough; anything labelled sugar-free will leave the drink thin and sharp.
- "Charged water"Plain carbonated water from the fountain's charging apparatus. Club soda or seltzer is the direct equivalent; tonic water is not, as its quinine and added sugar will fight the fruit.
- Total sugarFour and a half tablespoons of syrup is a substantial dose by modern palates. Starting with one tablespoon of each and adjusting upward is reasonable, since the lemon juice is the only thing balancing it.
- Order of buildingMix the syrups and lemon juice together first, as directed, before the ice goes in. Cold syrup is viscous and will sit in a stubborn layer at the bottom of the glass if you pour the soda water over it unmixed.
- Cracked iceIce cracked from a block, coarser than crushed and finer than cubes. Cubes work but dilute more slowly, so the drink stays sweeter longer; crushed ice waters it down fast.
- YieldOne glass. Scaling up means mixing the syrup and lemon base in advance and adding the charged water glass by glass at the last moment, or the carbonation is gone before it reaches the table.
This belongs to the American soda fountain at its height, when the druggist's marble counter was a genuine social institution and its syrup rail carried a range of fruit flavours to be combined on request. Formulas like this one, where strawberry, raspberry and orange are mixed together and brightened with lemon, show the fountain man's habit of building complexity from stock syrups rather than fresh fruit, with the fresh fruit appearing only as decoration. The straws are not decorative either; they were standard fountain service, and paper drinking straws were by then a manufactured commodity.