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Amycose
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; American Raspberry Juice, 1 ounce; Orange Syrup, 2 ounces. Juice of ½ an orange.
Shake well, add soda water, and before serving add a small, thin slice of orange or pineapple. Serve with two straws in a 14-ounce tumbler.
A fountain drink built in the standard order of the trade: ice, then flavour, then gas. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the ingredients are shop products that no longer sit on a shelf under those names.
- "American Raspberry Juice"In fountain usage "juice" often meant a sweetened fruit syrup rather than plain pressed fruit. A thick raspberry syrup is the safer substitute; unsweetened raspberry juice will read thin and sour against the orange.
- Orange syrupAlso a fountain staple: sugar syrup flavoured with orange. Two ounces is a quarter cup, so the sweetness load is substantial before any soda goes in.
- Ounces are fluid ouncesOunces here are fluid ounces: one ounce is two tablespoons, and the finished glass is a 14-ounce tumbler, a tall soda glass rather than a rocks glass.
- Half a tumblerful of iceIf judged against the same 14-ounce glass, roughly 7 ounces by volume of shaved ice, though the recipe does not say which tumbler is meant. Shaved rather than cubed.
- Soda waterThe original assumed a charged-water tap delivering a hard stream. Use the coldest, most strongly carbonated bottled soda water you can get, and pour down the side to keep the gas.
- Order of operationsShake the ice, syrups and fresh orange juice together first, then add the soda in the serving glass. Carbonated water in a shaker loses its gas immediately and the drink goes flat before it reaches the table.
- YieldOne drink. Two straws were commonly specified for tall fountain glasses; the recipe gives no sign the drink was meant to be shared.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran to hundreds of formulas, most of them small permutations of the same handful of bottled syrups, and proprietors leaned on invented names — pseudo-classical, pseudo-medical, sometimes pure nonsense — to make a familiar mix sound novel on the wall card. "Amycose" appears to belong to that class of coinages rather than to any documented tradition, and no dish or place has been identified behind it. What the recipe does record accurately is the economy of the trade: the fountain man stocked syrups by the gallon, ice by the block, and charged water on tap, and the fresh half orange and the slice of orange or pineapple on top were the only perishable touches, added at the last moment because they were what distinguished a fancy drink from a plain flavoured soda.