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Bob's Dream
Prepare a mild silver fizz, strain into a fancy stem glass, carefully pour down the inside of the glass about an ounce of abricotine, then pour down about half an ounce of claret wine. The abricotine will lie on the bottom, while the claret will stay between the foam and the fizz proper, making a very delicious and handsome drink.
A layered fountain drink that depends entirely on the density of what goes into it. The build is fussier than the ingredient list suggests.
- What a silver fizz isGin, lemon juice, sugar, and an egg white, shaken hard and lengthened with soda water. "Silver" means the white only; a gold fizz uses the yolk and a royal fizz the whole egg.
- "Mild"Probably means restrained on the gin, since a liqueur and a wine are going in on top of it; the recipe gives no measurements for the fizz itself. Keep the lemon and sugar in balance or the claret layer will taste sour.
- AbricotineA French apricot liqueur, brandy-based and sweet, once a proprietary brand name and now largely gone from shelves. Any good apricot liqueur will sit on the bottom as intended; apricot brandy in the dry eau-de-vie sense will not, being too light and too thin.
- ClaretPeriod shorthand for red Bordeaux. A dry, medium-bodied red works; anything jammy or high in alcohol will muddy the line rather than hold it.
- The hinge is the pourBoth pours go down the inside wall of the tilted glass, slowly; the back of a spoon helps. Poured straight in, the abricotine will not reach the bottom cleanly and the claret will bleed through the foam instead of resting under it.
- Glass and sodaA "fancy stem glass" means a footed glass; no size is given, so pick one with enough headroom for the foam collar. Use freshly opened soda water; flat soda gives no fizz for the claret to float on.
- Serve at onceThe three bands hold for a minute or two at most before the foam settles and the claret sinks. Build it in front of whoever is drinking it.
- Raw egg whiteNothing here is cooked. Use pasteurized whites if you are serving anyone very young, elderly, pregnant, or immune-compromised.
- YieldOne drink.
This comes from the era when the American drugstore soda fountain competed directly with the bar, and the dispenser was expected to keep a repertoire of showpieces on hand. Fizzes were fountain staples because the shaken egg white and the charged water were both things a fountain man had at his elbow all day, and because the drink looked like work being done. Whether a drink like this one " "Bob's Dream" " came off a fountain or out of a bartender's guide is not something the name settles, and for a build containing gin, abricotine and claret either is plausible. The layering trick, sometimes called a pousse-café effect, rests on nothing more than sugar content and specific gravity, and the fact that this recipe expects whoever makes it to know which of two liqueurs is heavier tells you how routine the skill was.