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Hot Lemon and Marshmallow
Mix four tablespoonfuls of lemon syrup with enough hot water to fill a glass. Put a spoonful of marshmallow cream on top.
A soda-fountain drink scaled for a single glass, and it depends entirely on the quality of the lemon syrup, which the book assumes you keep on hand.
- Lemon syrupNot lemonade and not commercial lemon extract. Fountain lemon syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with lemon; formulas varied, some using strained fresh juice and zest, others citric acid or oil of lemon. Bottled Italian-style lemon syrup works as a substitute.
- Four tablespoonfulsA quarter cup, or 2 fl oz.
- "Enough to fill a glass"Fountain glasses varied in size; with an ordinary tumbler figure roughly 6 oz of hot water over the syrup. Use a heatproof or tempered glass, or simply a mug; thin pressed glass and boiling water are a poor pairing.
- Marshmallow creamThe soda fountain's marshmallow whip — a pourable syrup-and-beaten-egg-white foam kept in a jar at the counter. Jarred marshmallow fluff is the direct descendant and behaves the same, softening into the surface of the hot drink rather than sitting on it like a modern marshmallow.
- Water temperatureHot rather than at a hard boil; boiling water slumps the marshmallow topping straight away.
- YieldOne glass. It scales directly — measure syrup into each glass rather than batching, since the marshmallow has to go on at the last moment.
This comes from a book of non-alcoholic drinks whose title trades on the American slang phrase "on the water wagon" — generally traced, though on anecdotal rather than documented grounds, to the horse-drawn street-sprinkling carts of the period, invoked to mean someone who had sworn off liquor. Collections like this one appeared in numbers in the years before national Prohibition, aimed partly at temperance households and partly at the drugstore soda fountain, which by 1900 had become a genuine commercial rival to the saloon and had developed its own repertoire of syrups, whips and creams. Hot syrup drinks were the fountain's cold-weather trade, filling the months when nobody wanted an ice-cream soda, and marshmallow whip got spooned onto chocolate, coffee and citrus alike. The pairing of lemon and hot water also carried a faint medicinal respectability, since hot lemonade was standard home treatment for a cold, which did a temperance drink no harm at all.