Home › At the Fountain › Gordon Cooler
Gordon Cooler
Orange syrup, 1 ounce; cherry syrup, 1 ounce; juice of ½ lemon; some shaved ice. Fill glass with soda, tip with slice of pineapple and a cherry; soda, tip with slice of pineapple and a cherry; serve with straws and spoon. An attractive fountain and good soda are better than a fine location. They will draw trade a block away.
A fountain cooler of the soda-jerk era: two heavy syrups, acid from a lemon, and carbonated water drawn from the tap. The whole thing depends on the syrups being true fountain strength, not the thin bottled sauces sold today.
- The ounces are fluid ouncesOne ounce of syrup is 2 tablespoons. Two ounces of syrup total suits a tall soda glass of roughly 10 to 12 oz, though the recipe itself does not name a glass.
- Fountain syrup is not squeeze-bottle syrupPeriod orange and cherry syrups were roughly two parts sugar to one part water with fruit juice or flavouring oil, thick enough to hold their own against carbonated water. A modern cocktail-grade syrup works; ice-cream topping does not, and sugar-free versions will read as watery.
- "Soda" means plain carbonated waterNot lemon-lime soda. Use seltzer or club soda, as cold and as freshly opened as you can manage, and pour it down the side of the glass so the syrups fold in without losing the gas.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved or finely crushed ice chills fast and keeps the syrups suspended rather than letting them settle into a sweet slug at the bottom. It also makes the drink drinkable through the straws the recipe calls for.
- Half a lemon is the variableDepending on the fruit that is anywhere from 3 to 5 teaspoons of juice. Start at the low end, taste after the soda goes in, and add more; the two syrups are sweet enough that the drink collapses without a firm acid line.
- The doubled line is a printer's errorThe doubled line -- "tip with slice of pineapple and a cherry" appears twice in the text as given, most likely a duplication in setting or transcription. Garnish once: a pineapple slice notched onto the rim and a cherry, which at the fountain usually meant a maraschino.
- The last two sentences are shop advice"An attractive fountain and good soda are better than a fine location" is counsel to the proprietor, not part of the build. Manuals of this kind mixed business notes in among the formulas.
- YieldOne glass. Multiply the syrups and lemon and build each drink individually; pre-mixing and then carbonating loses the fizz that the drink is mostly made of.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were written for druggists, who owned the fountain trade in America from the 1870s through Prohibition and beyond, and who dispensed carbonated water from marble-topped apparatus alongside prescriptions. A "cooler" in fountain vocabulary generally meant a tall, iced, fruit-and-soda drink, usually without ice cream, loosely distinguished from a soda proper, a phosphate, or a sundae, though the usage was never fixed. Names like Gordon were attached freely, sometimes for a customer, a town, a hotel or simply because the dispenser needed a heading for a new combination of syrups already on the rail; there is rarely a documented origin behind any single one. What the entry does show is how the business worked: a shop stocked a dozen or two syrups and generated a menu of dozens of drinks from permutations of them, and a line of trade advice sits beside the formula without seeming out of place.