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Lime Juice and Vichy
Into an 8-ounce glass of vichy shake a few dashes of lime juice from your spirit bottle or squeeze into it the fresh juice of half a lime. This is a fine into it the fresh juice of half a lime. This is a fine summer drink and a good demand can be created for it if you keep your lime juice good and fresh. Lime and pines is one of the famous lime juice combinations. Simply make a pineapple phosphate, substituting the lime juice for the phosphate and note the pleasing effect. This is a fine summer specialty.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen one, written for a dispenser standing at a marble counter with a bank of syrups and a carbonator. Two substitutions make it work at home.
- VichyAt the fountain this meant carbonated water charged with bicarbonate and other salts to imitate the mineral springs at Vichy, France — softly saline and distinctly alkaline, not neutral seltzer. Bottled Vichy Célestins is the closest thing still sold; club soda is the nearest common substitute, and plain seltzer will read as flatter and sharper against the lime.
- The spirit bottleA fountain fitting: a bottle with a perforated or dasher cap for shaking out small measures of juice, bitters or extract. A few dashes is roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon, so the fresh half-lime given as the alternative is a considerably bigger dose of acid.
- Glass sizeAn 8-ounce glass holds less liquid if filled with ice, though the recipe does not specify ice. Scale the lime accordingly if you build it in a taller modern glass.
- Lime juice, freshThe insistence on keeping it "good and fresh" is the hinge. Fountain lime juice was often bottled and preserved, and it oxidises quickly into something dull and faintly bitter. Squeeze to order.
- No sweetenerAs written this is unsweetened — lime and mineral water only. If it reads as thin, a half-ounce of plain simple syrup brings it into line with modern palates without turning it into a limeade.
- Lime and pinesA pineapple phosphate is pineapple syrup (about 1 to 1.5 oz) plus a few dashes of acid phosphate, filled with carbonated water. Here the lime juice replaces the acid phosphate entirely, supplying the sourness. Acid phosphate is still made for fountain revivalists, but this variation does not need it.
- A typesetting faultThe phrase "This is a fine into it the fresh juice of half a lime" is a repeated line from the compositor, not an instruction. Read straight through it.
- YieldOne glass.
Vichy water — from the springs in the Auvergne — was drunk in nineteenth-century America as a digestive and mild alkaline remedy, and American fountains soon manufactured their own by charging water with bicarbonate and salts rather than importing it. That medical pedigree is why a book like this treats vichy as a base in its own right, alongside plain soda: the dispenser was selling health as much as refreshment, and a lime juice and vichy sat comfortably between the two. Lime juice arrived with its own reputation, long associated with the British naval ration against scurvy, and by the 1900s it was a standard fountain acid, kept in a dasher-topped spirit bottle beside the bitters. The brisk commercial note — "a good demand can be created for it" — is characteristic of the genre; these books were written for the man behind the counter, and every formula was also a sales suggestion.