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Hot Tom (Mix ounce each fluid extract)
Mix 1 ounce each fluid extract gentian, caramel solution, soluble extract ginger, soluble extract capsicum, soluble extract orange, soda foam, simple syrup, tartaric acid. Mix well; pour 1½ fluid ounces into an 8-ounce glass, fill with soda water, and serve with a spoon.
This is a fountain syrup formula rather than a kitchen recipe: you compound a small bottle of flavoring base, then draw off 1½ ounces per glass. Read it as a pharmacist's preparation, since that is who the book was written for.
- What "Hot Tom" actually isDespite the name, nothing here is heated: the base is drawn into a glass and filled with soda water, so the "hot" refers to the capsicum burn on the finish rather than the temperature. Gentian supplies bitterness, ginger warmth, orange the top note.
- Yield and doseThe eight ingredients give roughly 8 fluid ounces of base, or about five drinks at 1½ ounces each. Halving the formula is sensible for a first attempt, as the capsicum load is the variable most likely to be wrong for a modern palate.
- Fluid extract vs. soluble extractA fluid extract is the concentrated alcoholic tincture of the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, roughly 1 g of drug per mL. "Soluble" extracts were reformulated to stay clear in water and syrup rather than clouding, which matters in a glass someone looks at.
- Soda foamThe period foaming agent, commonly a saponin preparation from quillaia (soap bark), sometimes with egg albumen. Quillaia extract is still permitted in soft drinks and sold to bartenders as foaming bitters or foamer; household substitutes such as egg white will not behave the same way.
- Caramel solutionBurnt-sugar coloring, not caramel flavoring or dulce de leche. Class I caramel color, or sugar cooked dark and dissolved in an equal weight of water, gives the intended brown without sweetness.
- The tartaric acid is ambiguousAn ounce of dry tartaric acid in an 8-ounce base would put roughly 5 g of acid in each glass, which is punishing. Fountain formulas often called for a made-up acid solution rather than the dry crystals, which would change the figure considerably; treat the quantity as unresolved and start far lower.
- Capsicum is the hingeSoluble extract of capsicum is potent enough that it was often measured by the drop. Compound everything else first, then add the capsicum a little at a time, tasting a test glass at full 1½-ounce dilution after each addition.
- StorageKeep the base in a stoppered dark bottle and shake before drawing, as the suspended matter may settle.
The American soda fountain of the early twentieth century was an arm of the drugstore, and its bitter, peppery "tonic" drinks sat somewhere between refreshment and remedy: gentian was a standard stomachic bitter, ginger a carminative, capsicum a stimulant, all three carried in the pharmacist's regular stock of fluid extracts. Names like Hot Tom are often said to borrow the swagger of the bar counter — Tom and Jerry, Tom Collins — though the derivation is conjecture, for a glass that contained no spirits beyond the alcohol in the extracts themselves, which suited both temperance sentiment and, after 1920, the law. Formula books like this one were trade manuals: dispensers were expected to compound their own bases from bulk drugs rather than buy finished syrups.