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Spring Cheer
Put three tablespoonfuls of ginger syrup into a glass of carbonated water. Sweeten with a teaspoonful of powdered sugar. Stir briskly and serve.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a cocktail: the whole thing rests on having a decent ginger syrup and cold, sharply carbonated water.
- Ginger syrupPresumably a house syrup of the usual sort, made by simmering bruised fresh or dried ginger with sugar and water and straining it. Bottled ginger syrup sold for coffee drinks will work, though it tends to be sweeter and milder in ginger than a home-made one.
- Glass sizeA soda glass of the era held about 8 to 10 ounces. Three tablespoonfuls of syrup is roughly 1.5 fl oz, which is a normal soda-fountain pour for that volume.
- The added sugarA teaspoonful of powdered sugar on top of a sugar syrup reads as excessive now. Taste first; the recipe says nothing about ice, but a thinner syrup or a diluted drink would explain the extra sweetening.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this means finely ground sugar, not necessarily the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar on shelves today. Superfine or caster sugar dissolves better and leaves no starchy cloud.
- Carbonated waterUse plain seltzer or soda water, not club soda with added mineral salts, and not tonic. Chill it hard and open it at the last moment, since stirring drives off some of the gas.
- Stirring"Stir briskly" is at odds with keeping the fizz. Add the syrup and sugar to the glass first, stir them together with a splash of the water, then top up and give it one gentle turn.
- YieldOne drink. Doubling the syrup into a pitcher and topping each glass individually keeps the carbonation better than mixing a batch.
This comes from the run of American non-alcoholic drink books published around the arrival of national prohibition, when "on the water wagon" was current slang for having given up drink. Ginger was a mainstay flavour in that literature: it was cheap, kept well as a dried root or a bottled syrup, and gave a soft drink a bite that lemonade lacked. Ginger ale proper was a brewed and bottled article, usually traced to nineteenth-century Ireland and later reformulated into the paler, drier "golden" and "dry" styles that came to dominate North American sales; what this page describes is the soda-fountain shortcut, a syrup and a squirt of gas assembled to order at the counter. Recipes like it survive in these books because the fountain, not the bar, was where such drinks were served.