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Hot Lime Pepsin
Mix one tablespoonful each of lime juice and lemon syrup. Add one teaspoonful of essence of pepsin, and fill up the glass with hot water.
A single-glass hot fountain drink from the era when a drugstore soda counter sold remedies and refreshments from the same taps. Two of the three ingredients are pharmacy and fountain stock rather than groceries.
- Essence of pepsinA pharmacy elixir of pepsin — the digestive enzyme obtained from hog stomach lining — carried in glycerin, dilute acid and aromatics, sold over the counter for dyspepsia. No equivalent "essence of pepsin" is a current retail product; the drink was presumably built around its supposed effect on the stomach rather than its flavour.
- Lemon syrupFountain lemon syrup, not lemon juice: a heavy sweet syrup flavoured with lemon, though period formulas vary in strength and in what they use for the flavouring. Substituting plain juice leaves the drink sour and thin.
- Lime juiceFountain "lime juice" of the period generally meant bottled preserved juice rather than fresh-squeezed, and some brands were sweetened cordials; the recipe's separate call for "lemon syrup" suggests an unsweetened juice here. Fresh juice works, but expect a sharper glass.
- The glassHot fountain glasses and mugs of the period ran to roughly 6 to 8 fl oz, so "fill up the glass" means a few ounces of water over the two tablespoons of juice and syrup plus the teaspoon of essence. One serving.
- Water temperatureHot drinks at the fountain came from a steam-heated urn or a hot-water faucet, hot but not boiling. Pepsin loses activity in very hot water.
- AssemblyThe juice, syrup and essence go into the glass first and the water is drawn on top, as the recipe has it; poured the other way round the syrup tends to sit at the bottom.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon is a collection of non-alcoholic drink recipes for home use published as national Prohibition arrived, and its title makes the pitch plainly: everything here is something to drink instead. The hot section is a reminder that the fountain traded year-round, and that its winter business leaned on drinks that doubled as remedies. Pepsin preparations were among the most heavily sold patent digestives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he catch-all complaint of the era. Pairing it with lime and lemon syrup turned a dose into something drinkable, and drinks of this kind sit exactly on the line the American drugstore straddled for decades, between the pharmacy and the lunch counter.