Home › Orange and Pineapple › Pineapple Delight
Pineapple Delight
Mix one tablespoonful of pineapple juice, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, and one teaspoonful of raspberry vinegar. Fill up glass with soda water, using the syphon, and garnish with fresh pineapple. Serve with straws.
A soda-fountain formula written for someone standing behind a marble counter with a syrup rail and a charged siphon. The quantities look absurdly small on paper; they are flavourings for a tall glass of soda, not a poured drink.
- Raspberry vinegar is a sweet shrub, not vinegarRaspberry vinegar is a sweet shrub, not a salad vinegar -- In period usage 'raspberry vinegar' generally meant a sweetened raspberry syrup soured with vinegar, i.e. a drinking shrub, rather than a plain wine vinegar. Straight raspberry wine vinegar from the salad aisle will make the glass very sharp; a shrub syrup is closer to what is meant.
- The pineapple juice was syrupFountain "pineapple juice" was generally a sweetened crushed-pineapple syrup rather than plain juice. If you use unsweetened canned or fresh juice, the finished glass will be thin and tart, and a little simple syrup is needed to bring it into balance.
- The siphonA charged seltzer siphon delivers soda hard and cold, which mixes the syrups without stirring. Bottled sparkling water poured gently down the side works, but stir once with a bar spoon or the syrup sits in a slug at the bottom.
- Glass sizeThe recipe gives no glass size and no ice. A standard fountain glass of the period held around 8 ounces, which is roughly what these small measures suit; in a 16-ounce tumbler the flavouring will be very faint.
- Fresh pineapple raises a problem with cream drinks onlyBromelain in raw pineapple will not affect a plain soda, so a fresh spear or wedge as garnish is fine here. It is worth knowing if you carry the syrup over into anything with milk or gelatine.
- YieldOne glass. Multiply the syrups and build each drink individually rather than batching, since the soda goes flat quickly.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of soft-drink manuals published around the arrival of national Prohibition in the United States — a collection of drinks to be made at home rather than a fountain dispenser's formulary. Drinks of this kind — two or three syrups, a squeeze of acid, and soda from the siphon — could be assembled in seconds. The raspberry vinegar is the older element: shrubs, fruit syrups soured with vinegar for keeping and for the clean bite acid gives against sugar, were a standard American summer drink long before Prohibition and were still stocked on fountain rails well into the twentieth century. The pineapple points to the same period's enthusiasm for canned Hawaiian fruit, which by the 1910s had made pineapple flavour cheap and reliably available year round.