Home › At the Fountain › Claret Limeade
Claret Limeade
Squeeze a small lime into a soda glass, add 1 ounce of plain syrup and spoonful of shaved ice, fill with solid soda. Pour an ounce or two of claret wine over top.
A fountain formula rather than a bar one: syrup, ice, carbonated water from the draft arm, and a wine float on top. Two of its four terms need translating before it will work at home.
- "Plain syrup" is heavier than bar simple syrup"Plain syrup" was heavier than bar simple syrup -- Soda fountains kept a stock syrup made denser and sweeter than the 1:1 syrup most home cooks make, though published formulas vary from about 1:1 up to roughly two parts sugar to one part water by weight. With 1:1 syrup one ounce may taste thin against a whole lime; go to an ounce and a half, or make the heavier syrup.
- "Solid soda" means the coarse streamFountain taps had a fine spray for building foam and a solid, unaerated stream for filling. It is simply carbonated water poured to fill the glass without whipping air into it. Chilled seltzer poured down the side of the glass is the equivalent.
- Glass sizeA soda glass of the period is usually given as holding about 10 to 12 ounces, so the drink is one lime and an ounce of syrup in something like 6 to 8 ounces of soda water, plus the wine. Serves one.
- ClaretIn American usage claret meant red Bordeaux, or anything sold in imitation of it: dry, moderate in alcohol, fairly tannic. A young, unoaked dry red such as a basic Bordeaux, Beaujolais or Cabernet Franc gives the right effect; a jammy high-alcohol red will fight the lime.
- Keep the float a floatThe point of the drink is visual and sequential, wine sitting in a dark layer over pale soda. Pour the claret slowly over the back of a spoon held at the surface, and do not stir. Serve with a straw and let the drinker mix it as they go.
- Shaved ice, not cubesA spoonful of shaved or finely cracked ice was all a fountain drink got; the soda arrived cold from the cooler. Cubes will chill less evenly and take up room the soda needs, so shaved ice or a small handful of crushed is closer to the intent.
- Limes then and now"A small lime" at the period would most often have been a Key or West Indian lime, more aromatic and more acidic than the Persian limes sold today. Half a large Persian lime, about three quarters of an ounce of juice, is a reasonable substitute.
Wine floats were a familiar trick of the American soda fountain in the decades before Prohibition, when the fountain and the saloon were commercial rivals and the fountain borrowed freely from the bar's repertoire. Claret was the most familiar red wine name in American retail, applied loosely to dry red wine of Bordeaux type and to a great deal of California wine sold under that label, and it turns up in fountain manuals in claret lemonades and claret punches, its colour showing well floated over pale soda. The formula reads as a lime version of the older claret lemonade, itself in the tradition of the wine-and-citrus punches of the nineteenth-century household. Books of this kind were written for the dispenser behind the counter, which is why the instructions assume a syrup jar, a draft arm with more than one stream, and a shaved-ice bin all within arm's reach.