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Hot Soda Recipes
Hot Apple Toddy.
Beef tea mug. One-half tablespoonful sugar, ½ baked apple, I wineglass applejack; fill balance with hot water; mix well, using a spoon. Grate nutmeg on top.
A soda-fountain version of a tavern drink, built in the mug with no shaking or straining. The measurements are fountain shorthand rather than bar measures.
- Beef tea mugA heavy handled china mug of the sort kept at the fountain for hot drinks, commonly somewhere around 6 to 8 fluid ounces. Any thick-walled mug of that size works; warm it first or the drink will be lukewarm by the second sip.
- WineglassIn American fountain and bar usage of the period, a wineglass is 2 fluid ounces. In a mug of this size that leaves roughly 4 to 5 ounces of hot water once the apple and sugar are in.
- ApplejackApple brandy, historically distilled from cider and often bottled at high proof. Modern bottled applejack is frequently blended with neutral spirit; an unblended apple brandy gives the fruit character the drink is built on.
- The baked appleThis is the hinge. A half apple baked until soft and slightly caramelized, mashed lightly against the side of the mug as you stir, is what thickens and flavors the toddy. A raw apple slice contributes almost nothing.
- Hot, not boilingWater just off the boil is right. Boiling water flashes off much of the brandy's aroma, which is most of the point of using apple brandy rather than sugar syrup.
- SugarHalf a tablespoon dissolves poorly in spirit alone; add it with the apple and a splash of the hot water first, stir to dissolve, then top up.
- YieldOne mug, one drink. It contains about two ounces of spirit, roughly a stiff cocktail.
Apple toddy was long established in American drinking before soda fountains existed: sugar, spirit, hot water and spice, in the same family as the rum and whisky toddies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century taverns, and it belongs to the cider-brandy country where applejack was a farm product. Some versions call for a roasted apple. Its appearance in a soda book reflects what fountains had become by the early twentieth century: year-round businesses that needed hot trade in winter, serving beef tea, hot chocolate, clam bouillon and toddies from the same counter and often in the same mugs. That such a book could list a two-ounce measure of applejack without comment also dates it: the hot toddy left American fountain menus with Prohibition and, for the most part, did not return.