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Long and Cooling
Serve in 8 or 9-ounce glass. Stem glass preferable. A favorite in New York City during the horse show. Fill glass ⅓ full cracked ice; add 1 dash orange bitters. Fill glass with ginger ale. (If ginger ale is in syrup form, add 1 ounce ginger ale syrup, and fill glass with carbonated water.) Stir; lay a slice of lemon on top of glass. Serve with straw sticking through lemon.
A fountain drink of three parts: ice, bitters, ginger ale. The only real decisions are the strength of the ginger and the temperature of everything going into the glass.
- The glassEight or nine ounces is a small glass by current standards — roughly a modern rocks or small highball. The recipe prefers a stemmed glass without saying why; the usual explanation is that the hand never touches the bowl, which keeps the drink cold.
- Cracked iceNot cubes and not crushed. Cracked ice is cubes broken into irregular shards, traditionally by striking them with the back of a spoon or a mallet. It chills faster than cubes and melts slower than crushed, which is the whole point in a drink that sits under a straw.
- Orange bittersA dash is not a fixed measure; from a dasher-top bottle it runs somewhere around 1/8 teaspoon. Orange bitters became hard to find for much of the mid-twentieth century and returned to wide availability in the 2000s; any current bottling works. They are alcoholic, though the quantity here is negligible.
- Ginger ale, then and nowFountains stocked both bottled ginger ale and a ginger syrup to be shot with carbonated water. Modern supermarket ginger ale is far sweeter and much milder than the Belfast-style ginger ales of the period; a dry or spicy ginger ale gives a closer result, and ginger syrup with soda water gives the closest.
- The syrup ratioOne ounce of syrup in a 9-ounce glass already a third full of ice works out to something close to 1 part syrup to 5 parts water. That is in the same range as common modern fountain dosing, so the proportion still reads sensibly today.
- StirringStir briefly and stop. A carbonated drink stirred hard loses its gas, and this one has nothing else in it to hide behind.
- The lemon and strawThe slice sits flat across the rim with the straw pushed through it, as the recipe directs. A thin wheel pierces more cleanly than a thick one.
- YieldOne glass. Everything is assembled to order; there is nothing to batch.
The National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden was for decades one of the fixed points of the New York social calendar, and this drink is recorded as a favorite during the show — long, pale, faintly bitter, and nothing like a child's sundae. Orange bitters is the tell: it is a bar ingredient, and its presence in a non-alcoholic fountain drink can be read as a sign of how fountains of this era borrowed the vocabulary of the saloon, offering something an adult could hold without embarrassment. Ginger ale itself is generally said to have arrived in American fountains largely by way of Ireland and Canada. The lemon wheel pierced by the straw is a fountain flourish that survives mostly in period manuals — a small piece of showmanship from a trade that competed on presentation as much as on flavor.