Home › At the Fountain › Calhoun Mint Julip
Calhoun Mint Julip
Two-thirds glass shaved ice, 2 ounces lemon syrup, juice of half a lemon, 3 dashes angostura bitters; add a sprig of fresh mint, and with spoon crush it against the tumbler to obtain the flavor. If mint is not at hand, use instead a dash of extract, with a slice of lemon. Fill with plain soda, serve with straws.
A soda-fountain drink, not a cocktail: the julep name is borrowed but there is no whiskey in it. Everything hinges on bruising the mint just enough to release oil without shredding it.
- Lemon syrupFountain lemon syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavored with lemon oil or extract, considerably sweeter than modern simple syrup. Two ounces of 2:1 sugar syrup with a little grated lemon zest stirred in comes close; ordinary bottled lemonade concentrate does not.
- The glassA fountain tumbler of this sort would have held somewhere in the region of 10 to 12 ounces. With two-thirds of it packed with shaved ice, plus the syrup and juice, there is very little headroom left, so the soda goes in slowly.
- Shaved iceShaved, not cubed. It chills fast and gives the drink the frosted body the recipe depends on; cubes leave it thin and the syrup sits in a layer at the bottom.
- Crushing the mintPress the sprig against the side of the glass with the back of the spoon a few times and stop. Grinding it releases chlorophyll and a grassy bitterness rather than the oil you want, and leaves black flecks through the drink.
- Mint extractThe substitute is a genuine dash, meaning a few drops. Modern commercial mint extracts are high-proof alcoholic tinctures and very concentrated; a quarter teaspoon will overwhelm the glass.
- Plain sodaUnflavored carbonated water straight from the fountain, drawn under pressure. Bottled club soda or seltzer works, poured down the inside of the glass to keep the fizz.
- BittersThree dashes of Angostura is doing the aromatic work here in place of spirit. It contributes a trace of alcohol, which may matter to some drinkers.
- YieldOne tall glass. Assemble and serve at once with straws, as written; it separates and loses its chill within a few minutes.
The soda fountain spent the late nineteenth century borrowing the vocabulary of the bar, and the julep was an obvious prize: a drink already defined by ice, sugar and mint, with the whiskey removable. Fountain manuals of the era are full of these translations, and they were often given proprietary or Southern-sounding names to sell the association, so a Calhoun julep evokes antebellum South Carolina and its most famous statesman without claiming any connection to him. The word julep itself is generally traced through Arabic julāb to a Persian term for rosewater, and for centuries in English it meant a sweetened medicinal draught, which is roughly what a fountain clerk was mixing here. The instruction to fall back on extract and a lemon slice when mint is not at hand is a reminder that these drinks were made year-round in city drugstores, long before out-of-season herbs were a given.