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Ginger Mint (Prepare a syrup of ounce)
Prepare a syrup of ½ ounce peppermint essence, 2 ounces ginger essence, sufficient water, enough syrup to make 32 ounces, ½ ounce magnesium carbonate. Mix peppermint intimately with magnesium carbonate, add 2 ounces water, mix, filter, add through the filter enough water to make 2 ounces of filtrate. Add the remaining ingredients and serve like ginger syrup.
This is a pharmacist's formula rather than a cook's, and it reads like one: the magnesium carbonate step is not an ingredient so much as a technique for getting oil-based flavour to disperse in water. Everything else is straightforward syrup work.
- The hinge: magnesium carbonatePeppermint essence is essentially oil dissolved in alcohol, and it will cloud and separate the moment it meets water. Triturating it with magnesium carbonate (light magnesia, sold as a food additive and still used this way) coats the oil droplets so they can be washed through a filter as a clear, faintly flavoured water. Skip it and you get a milky syrup with oil slicks on top.
- Ounces, fluid and otherwiseRead the liquids as fluid ounces and the magnesium carbonate as a weight — about 14 g. The finished 32 ounces is a US quart. "Enough syrup" means plain simple syrup; the pharmacy standard of the period was very heavy, on the order of 85 g sugar per 100 mL, which is closer to 2:1 than 1:1.
- Essences are not extractsNineteenth-century peppermint and ginger essences were alcoholic solutions of the oil or the drug, generally stronger and rougher than a modern supermarket extract. Start with half the stated peppermint and taste; too much reads as toothpaste rather than mint.
- Ginger essenceThe intended article is an alcoholic extract of ginger root, sharp and resinous. A commercial ginger extract or a strong homemade tincture of grated dried ginger in neutral spirit both work; fresh ginger juice does not, since it will not keep in the syrup.
- FilteringUse pleated filter paper or a coffee filter, and return the first cloudy runnings to the funnel until the filtrate runs bright. Then rinse the paper and residue with water until you have collected 2 fluid ounces of filtrate, as the recipe directs; collecting more will displace some of the syrup in the finished quart.
- Serving"Serve like ginger syrup" means roughly 1 to 1½ fluid ounces of syrup in the glass, filled with cold carbonated water and stirred once. A quart of syrup makes something like 20 to 30 drinks.
- KeepingHeavy sugar plus alcohol makes this reasonably stable, but the volatile mint fades. Bottle it full, cap tight, keep it dark and cool, and expect the best flavour in the first month.
Soda fountains in the United States grew out of drugstores, and formulas like this one show the seam plainly: the flavour is a pair of carminatives, peppermint and ginger, both long sold as stomach settlers, and the preparation is a straight lift from the dispensing bench. Trituration with magnesium carbonate to clarify a volatile oil in water was standard pharmacy practice, the same method behind aromatic waters and the old peppermint and ginger cordials sold by the spoonful. Books of this kind — fountain manuals and dispensers' formularies published in quantity from the 1890s through Prohibition — assumed the operator owned a graduate, a mortar and a filter funnel, and they wrote accordingly. That a refreshing summer drink and a mild digestive remedy were the same product, dispensed by the same man behind the same marble counter, is much of the point.