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Hot Raspberry Juice
Mix one tablespoonful each of strawberry and raspberry juice with two tablespoonfuls of vanilla syrup. Stir well, add hot water and whipped cream.
A single-serving soda-fountain drink, written in the shorthand of a professional dispenser who had syrup pumps at his elbow. The quantities given are only the flavouring; the volume of hot water is left to the operator.
- What "juice" meant hereAt a fountain of this era, "raspberry juice" and "strawberry juice" most often meant the thick sweetened fruit syrups kept in the syrup rail rather than fresh pressed juice, and the small quantity called for here points that way. Modern bottled fruit syrup or a good cordial gives the intended result; unsweetened juice will taste thin and sour against the vanilla.
- Vanilla syrupSimple syrup (two parts sugar dissolved in one part water) flavoured with vanilla extract to taste, about a teaspoon per cup. Commercial coffee-bar vanilla syrup works directly.
- How much hot waterThe original gives none. Roughly 6 fl oz of water just off the boil fills a standard mug and leaves room for the cream; the four tablespoons of syrup then read as sweet but not cloying.
- GlasswareFountains commonly served hot drinks in a footed, handled mug or in a glass set in a metal holder. A mug is the easier choice.
- The creamWhipped unsweetened, and spooned on rather than piped, so it floats and melts slowly into the surface. Sweetened cream on top of two tablespoons of vanilla syrup is too much.
- Stir orderCombine the three syrups in the bottom of the mug and stir before the water goes in. Once hot water is added the denser fruit syrup tends to sit on the bottom and the last mouthfuls come out sugary.
- YieldOne drink.
This comes from a run of hot fruit drinks in a book of non-alcoholic recipes. Hot fountain service was a winter trade: the same syrups that went into summer sodas were simply cut with hot water instead of carbonated water and finished with cream, which let an operator work a year-round menu from one rail of bottles. The name is a slight misdirection, since strawberry syrup is in there too, in equal measure with the raspberry. Vanilla syrup appears here as a rounding agent, softening the sharpness of the berry, and something like it survives in today's flavoured-coffee counters.