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Blood Orange Frappe
Juice of 1 orange, ½ ounce raspberry syrup, 1 dram lemon juice, 1 tablespoonful sugar, ½ glassful shaved ice. About half fill the glass with the coarse stream, stir, strain into a mineral water glass and fill with carbonated water.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen one, written for someone standing at a marble counter with a two-stream draft arm. Translating the vessels and the draft language is most of the work.
- The "coarse stream" is the pointFountain arms drew carbonated water two ways: a coarse (full, gassy) stream for agitating and dissolving, and a fine stream for finishing without knocking the gas out. Half-fill with something forceful enough to melt the sugar into the juice — a hard pour from a fresh bottle of seltzer works — then top up gently at the end.
- A dramA fluid dram is one eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3/4 teaspoon. It is roughly the juice of one lemon wedge.
- Half an ounce, one tablespoonHalf an ounce of raspberry syrup is one tablespoon; the tablespoon of sugar is dry measure. If your raspberry syrup is a modern sweetened cordial rather than a fountain syrup, cut the added sugar to a teaspoon or the drink will be cloying.
- "½ glassful shaved ice"The glass is unspecified; if it is the common 8-ounce mixing glass, that is about half a cup of finely shaved or crushed ice. Shaved ice chills and dilutes fast, which is what makes a frappé a frappé.
- Where the blood orange wentThe recipe calls only for an orange; the raspberry syrup supplies the red. With an actual blood orange the raspberry becomes optional, and half the quantity is plenty.
- Strain, then fillThe ice is a chilling medium, not part of the served drink — it is strained out. Serving over the shaved ice gives you a slush, not the clear frappé intended.
- YieldOne drink, served in a "mineral water glass" — a tumbler large enough to take the strained mixture plus carbonated water.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the counter rather than the cook at home, which is why the instructions assume a draft arm with coarse and fine streams and measure in fluid drams borrowed from the apothecary's graduate. The fountain grew out of the drugstore: apothecaries sold carbonated water as a health tonic, then found that fruit syrups sold better, and by the end of the century the syrup trade was widely reckoned the profitable end of the business. Frappé here means only that the drink is whipped cold against shaved ice, from the French frapper, to strike or chill — the frozen blended sense came later. Blood oranges, long grown in Sicily and Spain, appear in American markets as a seasonal winter fruit, and a dispenser short of them could approximate the colour with raspberry syrup, which is more or less what this formula does.