Home › At the Fountain › Ginger
Ginger
One-half dram American Extract Jamaica Ginger (from essence bottle), 1 ounce plain syrup. Mix with stream from the draft tube.
A single-glass fountain formula: flavor and sweetener in the bottom of the glass, then charged water forced in to mix. It works at a home counter with a seltzer siphon or a bottle of unflavored sparkling water.
- What a dram isA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, so half a dram is scarcely 2 ml — roughly three-eighths of a teaspoon. Fountain men dispensed it from a small stoppered "essence bottle," which is why the book specifies the source rather than a spoon.
- Plain syrupPlain syrup is simple syrup, and fountain plain syrups were generally heavier than a thin kitchen syrup, some formulas running as high as two parts sugar to one of water by weight, cooked just enough to dissolve. One ounce is two tablespoons.
- Extract of Jamaica gingerThis was an alcoholic tincture of ginger root, sold both as a flavoring and as a patent medicine, and far more concentrated than modern culinary ginger extract. If you substitute a supermarket extract, start at the stated dose and taste; if you use fresh ginger syrup instead, drop the plain syrup accordingly.
- The draft tubeThe draft tube delivered carbonated water under pressure, in a stream strong enough to stir the glass as it filled. Aim the stream at the syrup to combine everything, and stop short of the rim — no spoon, since stirring drives off the gas.
- Glass sizeFountain glasses of the period commonly ran 8 to 12 ounces, so the finished drink is roughly 1 ounce of syrup to 7 or more of charged water. That proportion, not the exact dram, is the thing to keep.
- Serve immediatelyThere is nothing to hold this together but carbonation. Build it over ice in a chilled glass and hand it over at once; ginger syrups made in advance are fine, but the finished glass is not.
Extract of Jamaica ginger was one of the workhorses of the American soda fountain, and its double life explains why: the same tincture sat on druggists' shelves as a stomach remedy and behind the counter as a flavoring, which is exactly the sort of overlap that made the fountain a fixture of the drugstore rather than the restaurant. Jamaica was long the benchmark source for ginger rhizome, and "Jamaica ginger" on a label was a quality claim as much as a geographic one. Ginger drinks also carried real commercial weight in the temperance decades, when a sharp, warming, non-spirituous glass had obvious appeal. The extract's reputation was ruined later: during Prohibition, cheap "Jake" was drunk for its alcohol, and adulterated batches sold around 1930 are generally credited with the mass paralysis outbreak that gave the country the phrase "jake leg." A formula like this one belongs to the earlier, unremarkable era, when the essence bottle was simply where ginger flavor came from.