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Fruit Phosphate
Mix one half pint each of strawberry, orange, pineapple, and lemon syrups with one tablespoonful of acid phosphate. Serve three tablespoonfuls to each glass one third full of cracked ice, and fill up with Apollinaris. Decorate with fresh fruit.
The St. Augustine Put a spoonful of vanilla ice cream into a glass, pour over two tablespoonfuls of strawberry syrup and two tablespoonfuls of vanilla syrup. Stir well and fill up the glass with soda water using the syphon.
Two soda-fountain formulas run together: a mixed fruit phosphate and, under the heading "The St. Augustine," an ice cream soda. Both are assembled to order from syrups kept on hand, so the quantities describe a batch of syrup base and a single glass respectively.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to fountains as a souring agent that gives tartness without fruit flavour. It is still made for the cocktail and soda trade; if you cannot find it, the drink will taste flat and sweet, since nothing else in the mix supplies acidity beyond the lemon syrup.
- The batch, not the glassHalf a pint each of four syrups plus one tablespoon of acid phosphate makes a quart of flavouring base. At three tablespoons per glass that is roughly twenty drinks, so scale down unless you are working a party.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water, naturally carbonated and distinctly saline, widely stocked in American fountains and bars around 1900. Any strongly carbonated mineral water stands in; plain seltzer works but loses the mineral edge the original traded on.
- Fountain syrupsThese are thick sugar syrups flavoured with fruit, considerably heavier than the thin modern coffee syrups. Homemade strawberry or pineapple syrup made by macerating fruit with sugar and straining gives a much better result than commercial pancake-style syrup.
- Cracked iceIce broken from a block with a pick, coarser than crushed and slower to dilute. Large cubes or a few chunks knocked off a slab are closer than the fine ice from a blender, which will water the drink down before it is drunk.
- The syphon mattersSoda drawn from a charged syphon enters under pressure and mixes as it goes in; the second drink has you stir the syrups into the ice cream first and then fill. Pouring flat-ish bottled soda down the side gives a separated, foamy glass instead.
- YieldThe St. Augustine as written is one glass: a spoonful of vanilla ice cream, four tablespoons of syrup total, topped with soda.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the era when the soda fountain was an explicitly dry institution, and it collects non-alcoholic drinks for mixing at home: iced, sharpened with acid, dressed with fruit, and served in a tall glass. Acid phosphate came out of nineteenth-century pharmacy rather than the kitchen — phosphates were promoted as tonics for nervous exhaustion before they became simply the sour note in a fountain drink — which is why a soda recipe reads like a compounding formula. Apollinaris, bottled from a spring in the Ahr valley, was an imported luxury advertised heavily in the United States and often called the "Queen of Table Waters," so calling for it by name signals a fountain with pretensions. The "St. Augustine" is one of the house names given to ice cream sodas; the ice cream soda itself is traditionally traced to Philadelphia in the 1870s, and it was long established by the time this book was printed.