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Hot Raspberry Ade
One-half ounce raspberry vinegar syrup, ½ ounce raspberry juice, ½ ounce lime juice. Add hot water, stirring well
A fountain formula rather than a home recipe: three half-ounce pours of syrup and juice topped with hot water from the urn. Translating it means knowing what glass it was built in and what "raspberry vinegar syrup" was.
- The measuresHalf an ounce is one tablespoon, so the whole flavour base is three tablespoons. The recipe names no glass; hot fountain drinks were commonly served in a mug or heavy glass of roughly 6 to 8 oz, which would put the hot water at something like 5 to 7 oz. One serving.
- Raspberry vinegar syrupNot a flavouring called "vinegar" for effect: it is a shrub syrup, raspberries steeped in cider or white wine vinegar and then cooked with sugar. It supplies the sharp, faintly sour backbone. Substituting plain raspberry syrup gives a much flatter drink; a splash of good cider vinegar into raspberry syrup gets closer.
- Raspberry juice at the fountainThis most likely meant unsweetened pressed juice rather than a second sweetened syrup. Bottled raspberry juice or thawed and strained frozen berries both work; avoid a sweetened cordial or the drink turns cloying.
- Lime juiceBottled lime juice was in common use at fountains and tastes flatter and more assertive than fresh. Fresh lime is fine but taste before you add all of it, since the vinegar syrup is already acid.
- Water temperatureHot rather than fiercely boiling: very hot water blows off the volatile raspberry aroma and sharpens the vinegar, so water taken off the boil keeps the fruit more forward. The recipe itself specifies nothing beyond 'hot water'.
- Order of buildingThe wording puts syrup and juices into the mug first, with the hot water poured in to mix them. Building it the other way round makes the syrup harder to incorporate, which is presumably why the recipe says to stir well.
Hot drinks were a serious part of the soda fountain's winter trade, when the ice cream side of the business slowed and the same syrup rail had to sell something warm. Raspberry vinegar, or raspberry shrub, long predates the fountain: sweetened fruit-and-vinegar syrups were a standard American summer refresher through the nineteenth century, valued because vinegar preserved the fruit's flavour without alcohol and because the acid made the drink genuinely thirst-quenching. By the time fountain manuals like this one were compiled, raspberry vinegar syrup was simply another bottle in the dispenser's row, and the same three-pour arithmetic used for cold ades was applied to hot water. The result sits somewhere between a fruit tea and a hot toddy without the spirit, and it hints at how closely the fountain trade shadowed the drugstore's older business of selling something restorative in a cold month.