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Hot San Toy Cocktail
One dash bitters, ½ ounce orange syrup, ½ ounce pineapple, piece of spice, a clove, and add hot water.
A soda fountain hot drink, not a cocktail in the bar sense: no spirits beyond the dash of bitters. It is essentially spiced hot fruit punch built to order in a mug.
- Fountain measuresHalf an ounce is one tablespoon, so the drink carries about 2 tablespoons of syrup in all. The recipe does not say how much hot water to add; a mug's worth, roughly 6 to 7 ounces, is a reasonable reading.
- "Pineapple" means syrupOn a fountain list this most likely means pineapple fountain syrup rather than plain juice, though crushed fruit was also kept at the counter. Canned pineapple juice sweetened to taste, or a thick pineapple syrup, gives the intended result; plain unsweetened juice will read thin against the orange.
- Orange syrupFountain orange syrups were variously made with oil of orange, orange juice or peel, and often a little citric acid. Any good orange syrup works, or dissolve sugar in fresh orange juice with a strip of zest.
- BittersAromatic bitters of the Angostura type. One dash is a few drops, on the order of an eighth of a teaspoon; more and the clove and bitters together turn medicinal.
- "Piece of spice"The recipe does not say which spice. A short piece of stick cinnamon is the obvious reading, and it doubles as a stirrer. Drop it in with the clove before adding the water.
- Water temperatureUse water just off the boil. Fountains kept hot water on tap from a heated urn or hot-water attachment, so it came hot rather than at a rolling boil.
- YieldOne drink. Scaling up for a group works, but steep the whole clove and cinnamon in the hot water first and strain, rather than leaving them in each mug for a long sit, or the clove takes over.
Hot drinks were the soda fountain's answer to winter, when nobody wanted a chilled phosphate: the same counter, the same rack of syrups, but hot water from the urn instead of carbonated water from the draft arm. Calling them "cocktails" was borrowed showmanship, since the only nod to the bar was a dash of aromatic bitters, and the drugstore fountain was often positioned as the temperance alternative to the saloon across the street. The name almost certainly refers to San Toy, Sidney Jones's enormously successful British musical comedy set in China, which opened at Daly's Theatre in London in October 1899 and enjoyed a very long London run; fountain men often named drinks after whatever show, song or celebrity was current, which is why so many of these formulas now read as puzzles. The spicing here, clove and stick cinnamon steeped in fruit syrup and hot water, is a direct descendant of much older wassails and spiced punches, scaled down to a single mug and mixed to order.