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Happy Hooligan
Malaga wine, 1½ ounce; raspberry syrup, ½ ounces; acid phosphate, 2 dashes. Draw into phosphate glass and fill with solid stream of carbonated water. This delicious phosphate can be made into a fancy 10-cent beverage by drawing into 12-ounce glass and garnishing with slice of orange, pineapple and cherry.
A soda-fountain phosphate, built directly in the glass and served at once. Nothing is cooked, so the whole thing hinges on cold water, hard carbonation and correct proportions.
- Acid phosphateA solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to fountains as a sour agent that tastes drier and less fruity than lemon juice. It is still made for cocktail and soda work; two dashes from a dasher top is only a fraction of a teaspoon, though dash measures were never standardised. Lemon juice is not a substitute in kind, only in function.
- The doubtful measureThe syrup is printed as "½ ounces," which is either half an ounce or one and a half. Given that fountain formulas of the period usually ran an ounce or more of syrup to a glass, 1½ ounces is the likelier reading, but the original is genuinely ambiguous. Build one at half an ounce first and judge.
- Malaga wineA sweet fortified wine from the Málaga region, dark and raisiny. Any sweet oloroso, cream sherry or Pedro Ximénez stands in without much loss; half an ounce in a tall glass leaves the drink barely alcoholic, but it is not a teetotal formula.
- Phosphate glassCommonly around 8 ounces, straight-sided. The fancy version calls for a 12-ounce soda glass, which means the same syrup and wine stretched over appreciably more water — thinner, and meant to be carried by the garnish.
- Solid streamFountain draft arms gave a fine spray for foaming drinks and a coarse, solid stream for phosphates. The point is to fill fast and hard from the bottom so the liquid mixes itself without stirring, and to keep the gas in. A siphon or a bottle of very cold seltzer poured straight down the centre does the same job.
- TemperatureCarbonated water holds its gas only when cold. Chill the water to just above freezing and the glass with it; a room-temperature seltzer will go flat before the drink reaches the counter.
- YieldOne drink. The recipe names only the ten-cent tier, reached by the larger glass together with the fruit garnish — orange slice, pineapple, cherry.
Happy Hooligan was a tramp in a tin-can hat, drawn by Frederick Burr Opper for the Hearst papers from 1900, and one of the most widely recognised comic figures of the decade. Soda dispensers borrowed such names freely: fountain trade journals and formula books of the 1900s and 1910s are full of drinks called after comic strips, songs, plays and prizefighters, because a familiar name sold a glass of syrup and carbonated water faster than a description of it did. The formula itself is a standard wine phosphate of the era, when fountains sold sweet fortified wine by the half-ounce as a flavouring alongside vanilla and raspberry, and acid phosphate did the sour work now done by citrus. The two-tier pricing is the practical heart of the entry — the same base at five cents in a small glass, or ten with fruit in a twelve-ounce one.