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Raspberry Cooler
Mix the juice of one orange and one teaspoonful of lemon juice with one tablespoonful of raspberry syrup. Sweeten with one tablespoonful of powdered sugar and pour into a glass half full of cracked ice. Add soda water to fill glass.
A single-glass soda-fountain drink that needs almost no adjustment, though a few of its assumptions have shifted.
- Raspberry syrupPeriod raspberry syrup was a thick sweetened fruit syrup, closer to a cordial than to today's coffee-shop flavoring syrups. A good grenadine-style or homemade raspberry syrup (equal parts crushed berries and sugar, strained) gives the right body; a thin flavored syrup will taste watery.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" often meant sugar milled finer than granulated rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now, though usage was not consistent. Either dissolves in the citrus, but superfine sugar keeps the drink clear.
- Soda waterPlain carbonated water, not a sweetened lemon-lime soda. The recipe is already sweetened twice, by the syrup and the sugar.
- Cracked iceCracked ice was chipped from a block with an ice pick: pieces smaller than a cube but coarser than crushed ice. Crushed ice will chill faster and dilute more; cubes will keep the drink sharper for longer.
- Order of operationsCombine and stir the juices, syrup and sugar until the sugar has fully dissolved before the ice and soda go in. Sugar added after the soda sinks and gritty settles at the bottom of the glass.
- Glass size and yieldOne serving; the recipe says only "a glass," which on these quantities implies something in the 8 to 10 oz range. The juice of one orange is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup, which fills a modern 16 oz glass too thinly; keep the glass small or scale everything up.
- BalanceA single teaspoon of lemon is doing the work of keeping the drink from tasting flat and syrupy. If your oranges are very sweet, add a second teaspoon rather than more syrup.
This belongs to a genre of soft-drink books that borrow the whole grammar of the bar and the soda fountain — coolers, fizzes, punches, shrubs — minus the spirits, which is why a drink of orange juice and berry syrup is called a "cooler" rather than simply lemonade. Fruit syrups were a backbone of the American soda fountain from the late nineteenth century onward, kept in pump bottles and combined to order with carbonated water, and household books of this kind passed something of the fountain man's repertoire to the home cook. Citrus and bottled syrup were cheap and available, and ice still arrived as a block to be cracked by hand.