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Ginger-Ade
Crushed ice, ½ tumblerful; Hub Ginger Ale Syrup, 1 pint; pineapple juice, ½ pint; grape juice, ½ pint; water, 1 quart; simple syrup, 5 ounces. With thousands of customers soda water is apt to taste as the fountain looks.
A fountain-scale batch drink rather than a single glass: roughly two and a half quarts of liquid, enough for eight to ten tall glasses over ice. The measurements are all by volume, in the trade units a soda dispenser had on hand.
- Hub Ginger Ale SyrupA proprietary fountain flavouring syrup, not something available now. A heavy ginger syrup — fresh ginger steeped in equal-parts sugar and water, strained — is the nearest stand-in for the pint called for.
- Half a tumblerful of iceA fountain tumbler ran 8 to 10 ounces, so this is about half a cup of crushed ice, and it is there to chill and slightly dilute the mix rather than to fill a glass. Add more ice at service.
- Five ounces of simple syrupFluid ounces, so a scant two-thirds cup. Taste before adding it: with a pint of ginger syrup and the fruit juices already in, many modern palates will want half that or none.
- The juicesGrape juice at a fountain of this period would most likely have been unsweetened Concord, which will tint the drink pink-purple rather than leaving it pale. Canned pineapple juice is fine; fresh pineapple juice will foam and needs straining.
- The waterNamed an "ade" but written for a fountain, so the quart of water may well have been drawn from the carbonated tap. Use chilled soda water if you want the drink the name promises, plain cold water if you do not.
- Mixing orderCombine syrups and juices first and stir them smooth, then add water or soda last and only stir once. Heavy syrup sinks and will sit at the bottom of the pitcher unmixed otherwise.
- Holding itPineapple and grape juice both dull within a few hours and the mixture separates. Mix the syrup-and-juice base ahead, refrigerate it, and dilute by the glass.
- The closing lineNot an instruction. It is an aside to the operator: a fountain that looks clean is a fountain whose soda tastes clean.
The American soda book belongs to a genre of trade manuals published for fountain men, the clerks who worked the marble-and-nickel dispensers that anchored American drugstores from the 1880s through Prohibition. Formulas like this one were written for a counter stocked with branded bottled syrups — Hub among them — and the fountain's own carbonated water tap, which is why the ingredient list reads as a shopping account rather than a set of steps. The "-ade" suffix, borrowed from lemonade, was applied freely in the period to any sweetened fruit or flavour drink, carbonated or not, and ginger was among the most reliable sellers: it was already familiar from bottled ginger ale and from the older home-brewed ginger beers, and it carried a lingering reputation as a digestive. Interleaved asides about the appearance of the fountain, like the sentence closing this entry, suggest that the trade understood that it was selling an experience at a counter as much as a glass of syrup and water.