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Ginger Phosphate
Bruise two or three mint leaves in a glass half filled with cracked ice, and add one tablespoonful each of pineapple, grape, ginger, and orange syrups, and two dashes of acid phosphate. Stir well and fill up the glass with soda water.
A soda-fountain build rather than a cooked recipe: the whole thing depends on having the four syrups and the acid phosphate on hand, and on assembling in the right order.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to fountains as a souring agent that adds tartness without the fruit flavour of citrus. It is still made for bartenders and cocktail suppliers; a dash from a fountain bottle was small and imprecise, so two dashes amounts to something on the order of an eighth to a quarter teaspoon. Lemon juice is not a substitute in kind, though it will sour the glass.
- Ginger syrupNot ginger ale and not ginger extract. Fountain ginger syrup was a heavy sugar syrup infused with fresh or dried ginger, comparable to the ginger syrups sold now for cocktails.
- Grape and pineapple syrupsPeriod fountain syrups were sweetened, strained fruit juice cooked down with sugar, closer in strength to a modern snow-cone syrup than to plain juice. Using unsweetened juice straight will leave the drink thin and sharp.
- Cracked iceIce cracked with a mallet from a block, coarser than crushed and finer than cubes. It chills fast and dilutes as the drink sits.
- Bruising the mintPress the leaves against the ice with a spoon rather than shredding them; bar tradition holds that torn mint tastes grassy. The recipe has you do this before the syrups go in, so the leaves have the ice to work against.
- Order and stirringStir the syrups and phosphate together thoroughly before the soda goes in. Heavy syrups sink and will sit at the bottom untouched if you charge the glass first, and stirring after carbonation flattens it.
- Glass and yieldOne drink. The recipe does not name a glass size; a fountain soda glass of the period could be anywhere from about 8 to 12 oz. The four tablespoons of syrup make it distinctly sweet by current taste; two or three syrups instead of four gives a cleaner drink.
This comes from a book of non-alcoholic drinks published as national prohibition was arriving, and the title tells you the intent: to climb aboard Uncle Sam's water wagon with something better than water. The recipe is pure soda-fountain practice, where the druggist's counter had already spent decades developing a repertoire of syrups, phosphates and mineral waters, and where acid phosphate was the standard souring agent because it gave a clean tartness that let fruit syrups read as fruit rather than as lemonade. Phosphates were often said to be sold by flavour -- cherry phosphate, lemon phosphate -- so a ginger phosphate carrying pineapple, grape and orange as well is an unusually crowded example. The style faded with the soda fountain itself after the Second World War, and acid phosphate was largely forgotten until craft bartenders went back to the old fountain manuals.