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Hot Ginger Ale
Four cubes loaf sugar, IO drops soluble extract ginger ale, IO drops soluble extract lemon, 10 drops fruit acid, or better a dash of lemon juice, 1 cupful hot soda.
A fountain drink rather than a bottled one: what arrives in the glass is hot, sweet, gingered water, closer to a winter toddy without the spirit than to anything carbonated. Nearly every ingredient here is a fountain-counter product that needs translating.
- "Hot soda" is not fizzyAt a turn-of-the-century fountain, the hot draught was plain hot water drawn from a heated urn built into the apparatus, served in a mug or a glass in a metal holder. Carbonation will not survive heating anyway; use plain hot water, about 6 to 8 oz, which is roughly the size of the mugs hot soda was usually served in.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar, sold cut or broken into rough cubes, so four cubes is roughly 4 teaspoons. Ordinary sugar cubes or granulated sugar work identically.
- Soluble extractsFountain "soluble" extracts were flavouring oils cut with alcohol and glycerin so they would disperse in water instead of beading on top. A modern alcohol-based lemon extract behaves the same way; a pure lemon oil will not.
- Ginger ale extractThis was a compound flavour sold by the syrup houses -- ginger with lemon and other citrus oils, sometimes capsicum for heat -- meant to reproduce bottled ginger ale, not plain ginger. Substituting ginger extract alone gives a flatter, sharper drink; a spoonful of good ginger syrup gets closer.
- Fruit acid"Fruit acid" meant the fountain's bottle of citric or tartaric acid solution, kept to give sweet drinks a lift. The recipe's own preference for fresh lemon juice is the better instruction: about a quarter-teaspoon.
- Ten drops is smallTen drops is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon. These extracts were concentrated, and the drink is meant to be delicate; overdosing the ginger extract turns it soapy and medicinal.
- YieldOne serving. Build it in the warmed mug, sugar first, then the extracts, then the hot water poured in briskly to mix.
Hot soda was a deliberate solution to the fountain's worst problem: the counter that made money all summer sat idle from November to March. From the 1890s onward, apparatus makers sold urns and hot-water attachments, and the trade press pushed hot drinks -- beef tea, clam bouillon, chocolate, malted milk, and hot versions of the familiar summer flavours -- as the way to keep the marble in use through winter. Hot ginger ale belongs to that last group: not a heated bottled soda but a fountain flavour rebuilt in hot water, trading on the old belief that ginger warms. Recipes like this one are written for a dispenser standing in front of a rack of soluble extracts and a hot-water spigot, which is why the quantities are counted in drops rather than spoonfuls.