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Hot Apple Float
One ounce crabapple syrup, 1 ounce pineapple juice. Stir while filling with hot soda. Top off with a small spoonful of whipped cream, sprinkling on top a little grated pineapple float.
A single hot drink built the way a soda clerk built it: syrup and juice in the glass first, hot liquid poured over, garnish last. Everything hinges on what "hot soda" meant at a fountain.
- "Hot soda" is hot waterWinter fountain service ran plain hot water from a heated urn or tap rather than carbonated water, which loses its gas when heated. Use water just off the boil.
- The ounces are fluid ouncesOne ounce of syrup is 2 tablespoons; the same for the pineapple juice. Total flavoring is about a quarter cup, so fill with roughly 6 oz of hot water in an 8 oz mug or a handled fountain glass.
- Stir while filling, not afterThe instruction is literal. Cold syrup dropped into the bottom of a glass will sit there under hot water; agitating as you pour is what integrates it.
- Crabapple syrupA fruit syrup that has essentially vanished from retail. It is a tart apple syrup, often pink depending on the fruit; strained crabapple jelly thinned with a little hot water, or a tart apple syrup, stands in for it.
- "Grated pineapple float"Most likely crushed or shredded pineapple floated on top of the cream rather than stirred in. Canned crushed pineapple, well drained, is the closest modern equivalent.
- Whipped creamAdd it at the last moment; on a hot drink it begins to slump within a minute or two.
- YieldOne glass. The proportions scale directly, but assemble each serving individually so the cream goes on hot.
Soda fountains were seasonal businesses, and the trade press of the 1890s and 1900s pushed hot drinks hard as a way to keep the marble counter earning through winter: hot chocolate, hot beef tea, hot lemonade, hot egg drinks and "hot floats" like this one all appear in fountain manuals of the period. Crabapple syrup belongs to the same moment, when American fountains carried fruit syrups made in-house from whatever the local orchards produced, crabapples being cheap, abundant and sharp enough to hold their own against sugar. The pairing of apple with pineapple looks odd now: a tart base syrup lifted by a second, more aromatic fruit, with the same fruit repeated as the garnish so the drink advertised itself.