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Lemon Fizz (Fill a ounce tumbler half full)
Fill a 12-ounce tumbler half full of seltzer water and squeeze into it the juice of a lemon. Into this stir a heaping teaspoonful of powdered sugar and serve while it is effervescing.
A two-ingredient fountain drink whose whole appeal is the moment of assembly; everything below is about protecting the fizz.
- The hinge: build it in the glass, fastSugar dropped into carbonated water nucleates bubbles violently, which is the point of the name. Stir once or twice and hand it over still foaming; a fizz that has settled is just weak lemonade.
- Seltzer waterIn fountain use this generally meant plain water charged with gas under pressure, though the term came from a mineral spring and usage in the manuals was not consistent. Use the coldest, most aggressively carbonated bottle you have, and open it at the last moment.
- A 12-ounce tumbler half fullThat is about 6 oz of soda, leaving room for roughly 1 to 1.5 oz of lemon juice and the head of foam. In a modern 16 oz glass the same quantities will look thin.
- Powdered sugarHere this means finely ground granulated sugar, sometimes called castor or fruit sugar. Confectioners' sugar with cornstarch will work but leaves a faint cloudiness; superfine sugar is the closer match.
- A heaping teaspoonfulCall it 6 to 8 grams. Lemons vary in size and acidity, so taste and adjust rather than following the spoon.
- YieldOne drink, meant to be finished immediately. It does not hold, will not scale into a pitcher, and cannot be made ahead.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries organized themselves around a handful of structural formulas, and the "fizz" was among the plainest: acid, sugar, and charged water combined so that the customer saw and heard the carbonation. Fountains at the time drew their own carbonated water from pressurized tanks, so the dispenser controlled the strength of the gas in a way that bottled soda does not. The name simply describes the effect rather than any origin, and variants abound in these books under orange, lime, and raspberry. Recipes this bare survive in print in numbers, spelled out for the fountain clerk glass by glass.