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Honey Orange
One ounce orange syrup, 1 ounce strained honey, 3 ounces shaved ice. Serve in 9-ounce glass, fill with soda. Stir, and add slice of lemon. If you want the best of everything, stand your thin tumblers on the rims in crushed ice. They will retain their coldness a long time.
A single-glass fountain drink built the way a soda jerk built it: syrup and ice in the glass, carbonated water from the draft arm, one stir. The whole thing takes under a minute once you have the syrup.
- The ounces are fluid ouncesFountain measures were generally by volume. One ounce is two tablespoons, so this is 2 tbsp orange syrup and 2 tbsp honey in a glass that holds about 1 1/8 cups.
- Honey needs help to combineCold honey will sink and sit at the bottom under carbonated water. Stir it into the orange syrup first, or thin the honey with an equal part of hot water and let it cool before measuring.
- "Strained honey"Period trade term for honey run through cloth to remove wax and bee parts, as opposed to comb honey. Any liquid honey today qualifies; a mild clover or orange blossom suits this better than buckwheat.
- Orange syrupThe fountain version was a sugar syrup flavored with orange peel oil and juice, not the concentrated orange juice sold now. Simmer sugar and water with the zest of two oranges, cool, strain, and add a splash of juice.
- "Soda" means charged waterPlain carbonated water from a siphon or a seltzer bottle, unsweetened and unflavored. Club soda works; tonic and lemon-lime soda do not, since the syrup already carries all the sugar.
- Shaved versus cubed iceThree ounces of shaved ice is roughly a scant half cup packed, and it melts fast enough to dilute the drink as it is served. Cubes give a colder, less diluted result but need a longer stir to move the honey.
- The chilled-tumbler trickStanding thin glasses rim-down in crushed ice does chill them before serving, though thin glass holds little cold and will not stay chilled as long as the recipe claims.
- YieldOne 9-ounce glass. With 2 ounces of syrup and 3 ounces of shaved ice, the soda fills the remaining 4 ounces or so.
Soda fountains were fixtures of American drugstores from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the trade published dispenser's manuals full of formulas like this one, meant to be memorized and thrown together at speed behind a marble counter. Honey drinks turn up regularly in these books, partly for flavor and partly for the health aura honey carried in a business still nominally attached to a pharmacy: the fountain's ancestry lay in medicinal mineral waters, and dispensers were happy to keep the association alive. The finishing slice of lemon and the fussy instruction about chilling the tumblers point to the competitive side of the trade, where an ambitious fountain distinguished itself from the one down the street by presentation as much as by flavor. Prohibition, beginning in 1920, pushed the fountain further toward the center of American social life before refrigeration and bottled soft drinks made it obsolete.