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Hot Tea
About 4 cubes loaf sugar, about 1 dessertspoonful extract Oolong tea, about 1 dessertspoonful prepared milk, hot water sufficient to fill cup, 1 tablespoonful whipped cream.
This is fountain tea, not teapot tea: the soda clerk kept a bottled tea extract under the counter and built the cup to order from the hot-water faucet. The measures assume a standard 6-8 oz fountain cup.
- DessertspoonfulA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, halfway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Two of them go into this cup, one of extract and one of milk.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was cut or nipped from a hard cone or block; by this period the term was also applied to the pressed cube, which is what this recipe calls for. Four cubes is roughly four teaspoons, which is a very sweet cup by current taste. Two is closer to modern palates.
- Extract of OolongA concentrated cold-water or steeped tea essence, sometimes preserved with a little alcohol or glycerine, kept bottled at the fountain so no brewing was needed. The nearest modern stand-in is a strong tea concentrate: steep about 3 tablespoons of loose oolong in a cup of just-off-boil water for ten minutes and refrigerate.
- Prepared milkProbably fountain shorthand for evaporated or condensed milk thinned with water and held ready for use; the recipe does not say. Unsweetened evaporated milk is a reasonable equivalent; whole milk works but gives a thinner cup.
- Hot waterFountain hot water generally came from a steam-heated tap and was hot rather than at a rolling boil. Since the tea is already extracted, boiling water gains nothing; water just off the boil is fine.
- The whipped creamSpoon it on last and do not stir it in. The point is a cold cap on a hot drink, the same contrast the fountain used in its chocolate and coffee.
- YieldOne cup. Everything here is built in the serving vessel, and most of the quantities are given as "about" -- the clerk was eyeballing to the rim.
Soda fountains ran year-round but soda did not, so the trade developed a parallel winter menu of hot drinks served from the same counter with the same equipment: steam tap, syrup pumps, whipped cream. Bottled tea and coffee extracts were the key to it, letting a clerk produce a cup in seconds without a pot, a kettle or any waiting. Oolong, a partly oxidised Chinese tea, was among the most widely imported types in the United States in this period and appears regularly in American fountain and household books of the era, sometimes alongside "English breakfast" and "Japan". The whipped cream and the four cubes of sugar suggest the drink was understood as a confection rather than a beverage in the English sense -- closer in spirit to a fountain hot chocolate than to anything served in a teapot.