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Ginger Tea
Make a hot lemonade either with lemon, sugar and hot water, or a lemulto lemonade, described on following page, and add 1 ounce American Extract Jamaica Ginger.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen one: a single hot drink built to order in a mug, assuming the dispenser has lemon syrup, hot water and a bottle of ginger extract within reach. Two of the three components need translating.
- The hot lemonade baseThe recipe leaves the proportions open. Something on the order of 1 to 1.5 oz lemon syrup (or the juice of half a lemon plus 2 teaspoons sugar) topped with 6-7 oz of hot water works. Build it in a warmed handled mug or a heavy glass in a metal holder.
- LemultoEvidently a proprietary lemon preparation for fountains; the book describes it on the following page. Nothing is sold under that name now, and a good lemon syrup will do the same job.
- Extract of Jamaica gingerAn alcoholic tincture of ginger rhizome, standard fountain stock and also a standard household stomach remedy. Modern equivalents are ginger extracts and tinctures sold as flavourings or supplements, and they are not standardised against the old product.
- That one ounceAn ounce is a large dose by any modern reckoning. Ginger extracts of this type were high-proof alcoholic preparations, so a full ounce in one mug would carry a substantial amount of alcohol along with a very sharp burn. Start with a teaspoon and taste up.
- If you use fresh ginger insteadSteep about a tablespoon of thinly sliced or grated fresh root in the hot water for five minutes, strain, then add the lemon and sugar. This gives heat and aroma without the alcohol, though it lacks the resinous bite the extract was prized for.
- YieldOne mug. Serve immediately, while hot.
Soda fountains did steady winter business in hot drinks, and this is one of them: a cold-weather counterpart to the summer phosphates and ice cream sodas that fill most of the book. Ginger tea sat in the useful space between refreshment and remedy, taken for chills, indigestion and the beginning of a cold, which is exactly the space the drugstore fountain itself occupied. Extract of Jamaica ginger was a pharmacy staple, high in alcohol because that is what pulls the pungent oleoresins out of the rhizome; it was sold by the bottle for both dosing and flavouring, and the ginger itself came, at least nominally, from Jamaica, whose cultivated rhizome was long the standard of quality in the English-speaking trade. The extract acquired a grim afterlife during Prohibition, when it was drunk as liquor and an adulterated batch caused widespread paralysis, but in the ordinary life of a soda fountain it was simply another bottle on the back bar.