Home › At the Fountain › Hot Royal Nectar
Hot Royal Nectar
One ounce nectar syrup, ½ ounce lime juice, ½ ounce grape juice. Fill with hot water, add a slice of orange and lemon.
A fountain drink written in the shorthand of a working soda counter: syrup and juice in the bottom of the mug, hot water to fill, fruit on top. The only real difficulty is that the key ingredient, nectar syrup, is no longer sold.
- The measuresFountain ounces are fluid ounces: 1 oz is 2 tablespoons, ½ oz is 1 tablespoon. "Fill with hot water" assumes the fountain's standard mug, roughly 6 to 8 oz, so figure 4 to 6 oz of water over 2 oz of syrup and juice. Makes one drink.
- Nectar syrupA stock fountain syrup, not fruit nectar in the modern sense. Published formulas vary a good deal: many are simple syrup flavored with vanilla and almond, with lemon, and some add pineapple or raspberry for color. A vanilla syrup with a few drops of almond extract and a squeeze of lemon gets you close.
- Grape juiceAt a fountain of this period this would most likely be bottled Concord juice of the Welch's type, much darker and more aromatic than pale white grape juice. A dark Concord juice keeps the drink's color and body.
- Lime juiceFountains generally used bottled, preserved lime juice rather than fresh fruit, sometimes sweetened as a cordial. Fresh lime works and tastes better, but it is sharper, so taste before adding more syrup.
- Water temperatureFountain hot water came from a steam-heated urn, hot but not boiling. Water just off the boil rather than at a rolling boil suits the drink better.
- The garnishThin wheels of orange and lemon, floated rather than dropped in whole, so the peel oils carry in the steam.
- BalanceWith modern syrups this may read sweet. Start with ¾ oz syrup and adjust upward to taste.
Soda fountains ran year-round, and the hot-drink page existed because a marble counter is a bleak place in February. Alongside hot chocolate, hot lemonade and beef tea, dispensers offered hot versions of their standard cold syrups, poured over urn water instead of carbonated water. "Nectar" was one of the great catch-all fountain flavors of the period, a blend whose exact formula varied from one syrup house to the next, and its name did the same work as "ambrosia" on the same menus: it promised something classical and restorative rather than any particular fruit. The generous use of bottled grape juice is a marker of the era too, since pasteurized unfermented grape juice had become widely available by the turn of the century and was often marketed as a wholesome, temperance-friendly tonic, which is exactly the register a drink called Hot Royal Nectar was reaching for.