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Hot Pistachio Punch
One ounce pistachio or almond syrup, 1 ounce cream syrup, ½ ounce cream, a dash of rum or bitters. Fill with hot soda, stirring well. Serve cinnamon.
A winter fountain drink, built in a mug rather than a glass. The proportions are for a 6 to 8 ounce cup, and the whole thing takes about a minute once the syrups are on hand.
- "Hot soda" is not carbonatedFountains carried a hot-water draw alongside the carbonated taps, and hot soda meant plain hot water. Carbonated water would foam over and go flat the moment it hit the syrup. Use very hot, not boiling, water so the cream does not curdle at the edges.
- Cream syrupA fountain staple, not a modern product: formulas vary, but generally cream or evaporated milk combined with simple syrup, sometimes with a little vanilla. Substitute 1 ounce simple syrup plus a splash more cream, or sweetened condensed milk thinned with water.
- Pistachio syrupPeriod fountain pistachio was almond-flavoured and green-tinted rather than actually nutty, which is why the recipe treats almond syrup as an equal swap. Orgeat is the closest thing on a current shelf and will taste more of almond than anything sold as pistachio today.
- An ounce is two tablespoonsThe half ounce of cream is one tablespoon. Scaled up: 2 tablespoons syrup, 2 tablespoons cream syrup, 1 tablespoon cream, then hot water to fill.
- Rum or bitters, a dashA dash at the fountain is a few drops from a shaker top, well under a quarter teaspoon. Bitters were stocked as a flavouring and a supposed tonic; either choice is there for aroma, not for strength.
- Serve cinnamonFountain shorthand for dusting ground cinnamon over the top, or standing a cinnamon stick in the cup. Grate it on last so it floats rather than sinking into the cream.
- Stir hard, and drink it warmThe syrups are heavy and will settle at the bottom of a mug. Stir from the base while filling, and serve at once; the cream skins over as it cools and the almond flavour turns dull.
- YieldOne cup.
Soda fountains had an obvious problem in winter, and hot drinks were the answer: from about the 1890s onward American fountain manuals devote whole chapters to hot sodas, hot chocolates, beef teas and clam broths drawn from a heated urn, using the same syrup rail as the cold trade. Calling this one a punch borrows the language of the bar at a time when many fountains were deliberately positioning themselves as the temperance alternative to it. Pistachio syrup of the period was mostly almond extract and green colouring, a fountain convention rather than a nut product, and the recipe's own instruction to swap in almond syrup is a quiet admission of that.