Home › At the Fountain › Fruit-Ade
Fruit-Ade
Juice of ½ orange, juice of ½ lemon, 2 tablespoonfuls pineapple juice, 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, ½ glass crushed ice. Fill glass with water; shake well and serve with straws.
A soda-fountain mixed drink built in the glass, closer to a shaken lemonade than anything carbonated. The proportions assume the fountain's standard tumbler and its powdered sugar, both of which need translating.
- Glass sizeThe recipe assumes the fountain's own tumbler, whose capacity it never states; period fountain glasses commonly ran somewhere between 8 and 12 oz. On that basis half a glass of crushed ice is roughly 4 to 6 oz by volume, with the water filling whatever room is left, so this is a single tall drink.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain usage of this period the term generally meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest equivalent; two tablespoons is generous, and one will suit many palates.
- Pineapple juiceBefore pineapple juice was sold on its own, it was often drained from canned pineapple packed in syrup, which would have been sweeter and thicker than modern unsweetened juice. If you use unsweetened, keep the full two tablespoons of sugar.
- Juice quantitiesHalf an orange gives about 2 to 2½ tablespoons, half a lemon about 1 to 1½. Squeeze fresh; the drink is nothing but juice, sugar, ice and water, and bottled juice shows immediately.
- ShakingThe recipe says only to fill the glass with water and shake well; a cocktail shaker does the job, poured out ice and all. Shaking dissolves the sugar and chills the whole drink.
- Water, still or chargedThe original calls for plain water. Carbonated water would make a livelier drink, and either works here.
Soda-fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries divided their contents between carbonated drinks, ice-cream dishes and "ades" — still or lightly charged fruit drinks sold to customers who wanted something cold and non-alcoholic. The suffix comes from lemonade, itself borrowed from French limonade, and American fountains extended it freely to orangeade, limeade and catch-all mixtures of this kind. Hawaiian pineapple canning grew rapidly from the early twentieth century, and fountain formularies took up pineapple juice as a way to give a mixed-juice drink body and perfume without extra syrup. Drinks like this were the working stock of the fountain, mixed to order in front of the customer, and the instruction to serve with straws suggests a counter drink rather than something sent out.