Home › At the Fountain › Ginger Mint (One ounce ginger cordial syrup)
Ginger Mint (One ounce ginger cordial syrup)
One ounce ginger cordial syrup, 1 ounce creme de menthe syrup. Put in hot soda mug, fill with hot water, add spoonful of whipped cream, top with American Regal Ground Spices.
A hot fountain drink from the era when soda counters stayed open through winter by serving their syrups in mugs instead of glasses. It assembles in under a minute once you understand what the two syrups actually are.
- The syrups are non-alcoholicFountain "creme de menthe syrup" was a green peppermint sugar syrup, not the liqueur; ginger cordial syrup was a sweetened ginger extract, closer to a strong ginger simple syrup than to modern ginger beer. Substitute a good peppermint syrup and a homemade or bottled ginger syrup.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesOne ounce is 2 tablespoons, so the drink starts with a quarter-cup of syrup. That is sweet by current taste; an ounce total, split between the two, suits most palates in a 6 oz mug.
- The hot soda mugFountains kept heavy china mugs for hot service, made to hold heat. Any preheated stoneware mug does the job — rinse it with boiling water first, since a cold mug pulls the drink down to lukewarm.
- Hot water, not boilingThe recipe specifies only "hot water." Water taken off a full boil is gentler on the mint and ginger aromatics, and less likely to slump the cream the moment it lands.
- The cream should floatUse cream whipped only to soft peaks and unsweetened — the syrups carry all the sugar the drink needs. Spoon it on rather than piping, so it sits as a cap instead of dissolving in.
- American Regal Ground SpicesA supplier's brand name; the recipe gives no indication of what the blend contained, beyond its being a shaker-top spice for topping hot drinks. A grating of nutmeg with a pinch of cinnamon stands in.
- YieldOne mug. The recipe is written as a single fountain order and does not scale into a pot — mix each mug to order or the cream sits and weeps.
Soda fountains were a summer trade, and hot drinks were the standard answer to the dead months between November and March. Dispenser manuals of the early twentieth century carry whole chapters of hot syrup service — hot chocolate, hot lemonade, beef tea, and combinations like this one that simply took the bottled fruit and cordial syrups already on the rail and married them to hot water instead of carbonated. Ginger and mint were both stocked as much for their digestive reputation as their flavour, a holdover from the fountain's origins in the pharmacy, where the soda counter sat at the front of a drugstore and the man mixing the drink was often the same man filling prescriptions. The instruction to top with a named brand of ground spice is a reminder that books of this kind were partly trade literature: recipes circulated with supplier names attached, and the dispenser was expected to have the shaker on the counter.