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Ginger Frui-Tana
One ounce ginger frui-tana syrup, 3 dashes essence ginger. Add hot soda and a slice of lemon. To make the ginger frui-tana syrup take 6 ounces lemon. To make the ginger frui-tana syrup take 6 ounces soluble essence of ginger, 8 ounces pineapple juice, 1 ounce foam extract, 2 drams fruit acid, 1 gallon simple syrup. Mix well. Get your fountain ready each day before the first customer arrives:
A hot-water fountain drink built on a house syrup. The text is garbled where the syrup formula begins — the line "take 6 ounces lemon" is a printer's false start, and the real formula follows in the repeated sentence.
- Hot soda is not carbonatedAt a period fountain the "hot soda" tap drew plain hot water, held near boiling in a nickel urn. Carbonation would be lost instantly at that temperature; this is a hot toddy-style drink, served in a small handled mug or a glass in a metal holder.
- The drink itselfOne fluid ounce of syrup plus three dashes of ginger essence, topped with hot water (the recipe does not say how much; a small mug's worth, perhaps 5 to 6 oz) and a lemon slice. That is the whole build; the trailing sentence about readying the fountain appears to belong to a neighbouring entry rather than to this one.
- Drams and ouncesThe measures here appear to be fluid: a fluid dram is 1/8 fluid ounce, roughly 3.7 ml, so 2 drams of fruit acid is about a teaspoon and a half. "Fruit acid" in fountain work generally means citric acid, sometimes tartaric, and fountain formulas often called for it as a solution rather than dry crystals.
- Soluble essence of gingerAn alcohol-and-water ginger extract made to stay clear in syrup, unlike oleoresin or tincture of ginger, which cloud. A strong modern ginger extract works in its place, but start at half the quantity and taste — 6 oz in a gallon of syrup is a very forward heat.
- Foam extractA saponin preparation, historically quillaia (soap bark) or yucca, used to give fountain drinks a lasting head. It is still a permitted food additive but is not a grocery item; leaving it out costs only appearance.
- Simple syrup at fountain strengthFountain simple syrup was heavy: period formulas call for something on the order of 13 to 14 lb of sugar to a gallon of water, far denser than the 1:1 kitchen version (a gallon of finished syrup itself holds only about 7 lb of dissolved sugar). Using a thin syrup will make the finished drink taste watery at the one-ounce dose.
- YieldThe formula makes a little over a gallon of syrup, about 140 servings at 1 oz each. To try the drink first, scale to 4 oz of syrup: about 1 teaspoon ginger essence, 1 1/2 teaspoons pineapple juice, a pinch of citric acid, 4 oz simple syrup.
- Pineapple juiceCanned juice was commonly used at the fountain and is the steadier choice here; fresh juice is more perishable, so a syrup made with it should be kept refrigerated and used up quickly.
Soda fountains of the early twentieth century fought a seasonal problem: cold drinks stopped selling in December. The answer was the hot soda counter — beef bouillon, hot malted milk, hot lemonade, and spiced ginger drinks drawn from an urn of hot water and dosed with the same syrups used in summer. Ginger was the obvious winter flavor, carrying a long-standing reputation as a warming stomachic, and the lemon slice borrowed the look of a medicinal hot toddy without the spirits. "Frui-Tana" is a dispenser's coinage of the sort that filled trade books of the period, when a fountain man's stock in trade was a proprietary-sounding name attached to a formula he mixed himself; the fruit-acid-and-foam-extract combination is pure fountain craft, meant to make a sweet syrup taste bright and to give the glass a head it would not otherwise hold.