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Loganberry Cup
Mix one half pound of preserved ginger cut in small pieces, a cupful of sugar, and two quarts of water. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and let stand for half an hour. Put over fire and simmer for fifteen minutes. To serve, add three tablespoonfuls of the syrup to a glass of loganberry juice and cracked ice.
Cherry Phosphate No. 1 Put two tablespoonfuls of wild cherry syrup into a glass, add four dashes of acid phosphate and fill up with soda water. Stir well. Cherry Phosphate No. 2 Mix two tablespoonfuls of pineapple syrup with one tablespoonful of cherry syrup and one tablespoonful of orange syrup. Add crushed ice, soda water, and one half teaspoonful of acid phosphate. Stir well.
Three soda-fountain drinks run together on one page: a ginger syrup to be diluted with loganberry juice, and two phosphates. All three assume a household stocked like a 1919 drugstore counter.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger packed in heavy syrup, sold in jars or in old-fashioned Chinese stoneware crocks, not the dry crystallized kind. Crystallized ginger will work but carries its own sugar coating, so cut the added cup of sugar back by a few tablespoons.
- What the syrup yieldsTwo quarts of water simmered fifteen minutes reduces very little, so expect close to 2 quarts (about 1.9 L) of thin ginger syrup. At three tablespoons per glass that is roughly forty servings' worth. Strain out the ginger pieces before bottling and keep it refrigerated; with this little sugar it is not shelf-stable and may start to ferment within a week or two.
- It is a syrup, not a punchThe finished drink is a glass of loganberry juice over cracked ice with three tablespoons of the ginger syrup stirred in. Nothing here is carbonated unless you add soda water yourself, which is worth doing.
- Loganberry juiceA commercial staple in the Pacific Northwest a century ago and hard to buy now. Unsweetened blackberry or a blackberry-raspberry blend is the closest match, since the loganberry is a cross of the two; if the juice is already sweetened, cut the syrup to a tablespoon and taste.
- Acid phosphateNot a substitute for lemon juice. It is a dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, and it gives sourness with no fruit flavour of its own. Bar-supply houses still sell it; a "dash" is usually reckoned at around 1/8 teaspoon, though fountain bottles varied, which would put four dashes somewhere near half a teaspoon.
- Wild cherry syrupThe drugstore article was made from wild cherry bark, faintly bitter and almond-scented rather than fruity. Modern cherry syrup is sweeter and rounder, so start with less acid phosphate and adjust.
- Building the phosphatesPut the syrups and the phosphate in the glass first, add ice, then charge with cold soda water poured down the side. Stirring too vigorously after the soda goes in flattens the drink; a single lift with a long spoon is enough.
This page comes from the wave of temperance drink books published as national Prohibition arrived, when the amateur host was suddenly expected to reproduce at home what the corner soda fountain had been selling for decades. The three drinks are pure fountain formulae: a flavouring syrup made in bulk, then combined to order with ice and charged water. Acid phosphate is the giveaway, since it was a pharmacist's preparation before it was a bartender's, and its tartness was what kept a glass of sugar syrup from cloying. The loganberry dates from about 1881 in California, and commercial planting in Oregon and Washington was an early-1900s development, so the crop was perhaps fifteen or twenty years old in the Northwest by 1919; bottled loganberry juice was marketed hard in those years as a wholesome, respectable drink, which is precisely why it turns up in a book pledged to Uncle Sam's water wagon.