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Molly Pitcher
Squeeze the juice from six lemons. Strain, and add one fourth pint of strawberry juice, one quart of maple syrup, and one quart of plain syrup. Put four tablespoonfuls of this syrup into a glass and fill up with Apollinaris.
A soda-fountain syrup, mixed to order by the glass. The recipe makes far more syrup than one drink, so treat it as a bottled base to keep in the refrigerator.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated German mineral water, heavily advertised in the early 1900s as "the Queen of Table Waters." It is still sold, but any strongly carbonated mineral water or plain seltzer works; the mineral tang is part of the point, so avoid flavored sparkling water.
- Plain syrupSoda-fountain shorthand for simple syrup. Fountain syrups were generally heavy, often in the region of two parts sugar to one part water by weight, dissolved over heat and cooled; a 1:1 syrup will give a thinner, less clinging drink.
- One fourth pintHalf a cup of strawberry juice. Press ripe hulled berries through a fine sieve or jelly bag rather than blending, or the syrup turns cloudy and pulpy.
- YieldSix lemons, half a cup of fruit juice and two quarts of syrup come to roughly two and a quarter quarts of base. At four tablespoonfuls a glass that is around thirty-five drinks, so scale down to a quarter of the recipe unless you are serving a crowd.
- Keeping itFresh fruit juice and lemon shorten the life of a sugar syrup considerably. Bottle it, refrigerate, and use within about a week; taste before serving, since fermentation shows first as a faint yeasty prickle.
- ServingPut the syrup in the glass first, add ice, then the mineral water poured down the side and stirred once from the bottom. Over-stirring flattens the carbonation, which is the only thing giving the drink structure.
Molly Pitcher is the nickname attached by tradition to Mary Ludwig Hays, said to have carried pitchers of water to American gunners at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778 and to have served a cannon herself after her husband fell; the story is largely a nineteenth-century patriotic construction, but it made her an apt patron for a book of waterborne beverages. The formula itself is straight soda-fountain practice of the period, when druggists kept rows of fruit syrups to be dosed by the spoonful and topped with carbonated water. The maple syrup is the American note, standing in for part of the sugar and giving the drink a caramel depth that plain syrup alone cannot.