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Claret Francaise
Draw 1 ounce each claret and strawberry syrup in a mineral glass. Add dash of phosphate, fill glass with solid soda, stir and serve.
A two-syrup fountain drink that comes together in under a minute, provided you understand what the fountain man's shorthand meant. The whole thing turns on the phosphate, which supplies the tartness that keeps the wine and the strawberry from collapsing into cough syrup.
- Acid phosphate is the hingeA "dash of phosphate" means acid phosphate, a dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts. It gives a dry, mineral sourness with none of the fruit flavour of lemon juice, and it is still made for the cocktail trade. Modern practice usually treats a dash as about a quarter teaspoon, though fountain dash-bottles delivered somewhat more; lemon juice is not a substitute, though it will at least keep the drink from being cloying.
- "Solid soda"Fountain apparatus had a coarse stream and a fine stream. Solid soda is the coarse one, delivered straight into the glass to fill it with liquid rather than whipping up a head of foam. From a siphon or a bottle, pour down the side of the glass to keep the carbonation in the drink.
- Mineral glassA footed fountain glass of roughly 8 to 10 ounces. With two ounces of syrup and wine in the bottom, you are adding six to eight ounces of soda.
- ClaretIn American usage of this period, claret meant a dry red wine in the Bordeaux style, often domestic. Any light, dry, unoaked red works; avoid anything jammy or high in alcohol, which will fight the strawberry.
- Strawberry syrupFountain syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, roughly two parts sugar to one of water, flavoured with strawberry juice. Modern coffee-bar syrups are thinner and often taste of candy; a homemade syrup of macerated berries strained and cooked with an equal weight of sugar is closer to the original.
- StirringOne gentle pass with a long spoon from the bottom up. The syrup sits at the base of the glass and needs to be lifted, but over-stirring flattens the soda entirely.
- Yield and alcoholOne glass. The ounce of claret in eight or nine ounces of finished drink works out to somewhere around one percent alcohol by volume, perhaps a little above it: very low, but not alcohol-free.
Wine appears more often in American soda fountain manuals than most people expect. Before Prohibition, claret, sherry, port and catawba all had their place among the syrups, and a fountain could serve a mildly alcoholic drink to someone who would not have gone into a saloon. The phosphate is the marker of the era: acid phosphate was sold to druggists by the gallon and was the standard souring agent at the fountain, where the dispenser was as often a pharmacist as a confectioner. The name follows a pattern visible throughout the manuals: Francaise, or a la Parisienne, or Royale was often appended to a two-ingredient formula, though what the tag was meant to accomplish is not recorded, and it usually signals nothing more specific than the vaguely French associations of claret itself.