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Jersey Fizz
Fill mixing glass one-third full cracked ice, add juice of ½ lemon, ½ ounce of lemon syrup, ½ ounce of pineapple syrup, white of 1 egg, 2 dashes bitters. Shake, add soda and strain in straight glass. Serve with straws. Keep a tempting list of flavors in plain sight.
Crushed Ice, ½ tumblerful; Hub Ginger Ale Syrup, 1 pint; American Pineapple Syrup, ½ pint; American Grape Juice, ½ pint; Water, 1 quart; Simple Syrup, 5 ounces.
A soda-fountain fizz recorded in shorthand for a working dispenser, with a second, unrelated bulk formula run onto the end of it by the typesetter. Read the two halves separately before you read anything else.
- Why the cautionThe drink is built on the raw white of one egg, shaken cold and served immediately. Uncooked shell egg carries a Salmonella risk that shaking and carbonated water do nothing to reduce, and a fountain drink is never brought anywhere near a safe temperature. If you want an egg-white fizz, use a current recipe written around pasteurized whites.
- Two recipes, one paragraphEverything from "Crushed Ice, ½ tumblerful" onward belongs to a different formula, a bulk ginger ale and grape juice mixture given by volume. It has no instructions attached and is not part of the fizz.
- The fountain measuresAn ounce here is a fluid ounce, so ½ ounce is a tablespoon. A "dash" from a bitters bottle is roughly ⅛ teaspoon. "Mixing glass one-third full" of cracked ice would be about five ounces of ice if the glass held a pint; the book does not say what size glass it means.
- Lemon syrup and pineapple syrupThese would have been house stock at the fountain, typically a sugar syrup carrying citric acid and lemon oil in one case and a sweetened pineapple syrup in the other. Modern syrups sold under the same names vary, and the fresh lemon juice is what keeps the drink from cloying.
- "Add soda"Charged water from the fountain siphon, added after shaking and never shaken with the egg — carbonation and a shaker tin do not coexist. Straining into a straight glass, not a stemmed one, marks this as a tall drink rather than a cocktail.
- The advertising line"Keep a tempting list of flavors in plain sight" is trade advice to the soda clerk, not a step. Books of this kind were often issued or subsidised by syrup houses, which is why brand names sit inside the measurements.
- YieldThe fizz is a single glass. The bulk formula that follows totals about 69 fluid ounces, a little over two quarts, before ice.
The "fizz" was the soda fountain's answer to the saloon: a shaken sour lengthened with charged water, sold across a marble counter to people who either could not or would not drink at a bar. Egg white appears in many fountain fizzes, valued for the foam it throws up under the shaker and the body it gives a drink made mostly of syrup and gas — the same reasoning behind the bar-room silver fizz of the same decades. The name Jersey is not explained in the text and cannot be accounted for from the page. The trailing bulk formula, with its branded ginger ale syrup and American grape juice, points to the other half of the trade: unfermented grape juice and ginger ale were staples of the temperance drinks business, and soda books of the period sold both at once.