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Lemonade Plain
Lemon, juice of, 1; Cracked Ice, ½ tumblerful; Powdered Sugar, 1 tablespoonful; Ice Water, 8 ounces. Shake thoroughly, then add a slice of lemon and orange. Serve with 2 straws. Soda water is a matter of taste-in a double sense. Scores of customers lose their thirst when they see a slovenly fountain. Keep your fountain clean.
A single-serving fountain lemonade, written for a soda clerk with a shaker and a chipped-ice bin. It scales up easily once you know what the measures mean.
- Tumbler sizeSoda fountain tumblers of this era commonly ran somewhere around 8 to 12 ounces. Half a tumblerful of cracked ice would then be roughly 5 to 6 ounces by volume, about two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup.
- Ice water, 8 ouncesThat is one cup, added to a shaker already holding half a tumbler of cracked ice. Expect the finished drink to run somewhat over 8 ounces once the ice has melted into it.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain work of this period this means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar is the direct equivalent; ordinary granulated will dissolve if you shake long enough.
- One lemon's juiceA large modern supermarket lemon can give 3 tablespoons or more, which will overwhelm one tablespoon of sugar. Taste and add sugar rather than trusting the ratio.
- Shake thoroughlyThe shaking is doing the dissolving here, since there is no syrup. Fifteen to twenty seconds of hard shaking; the outside of the shaker should frost.
- Garnish and serviceThe lemon and orange slices go in after shaking so they stay intact. Two straws is what the recipe specifies; it appears often enough in fountain instructions to look like a service convention rather than a romantic gesture.
- YieldOne drink. For a pitcher, figure the juice of 6 lemons, 6 tablespoons sugar and 6 cups water, stirred until clear and poured over ice at the table.
Fountain lemonade sat slightly apart from the rest of the soda book: it uses no carbonated water and no bottled syrup, and in the manuals "plain" more usually distinguishes it from the carbonated, egg and fruit versions listed alongside it. Most drinks in these manuals were generally built from a measured pump of flavoring syrup and a stream of charged water, so a shaken fresh-fruit lemonade was the dispenser's proof that he could actually work fruit rather than just pull handles. The closing remark about the slovenly fountain is characteristic of the trade literature of the period, when drugstore soda counters were competing hard on appearances.