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Manhattan Rickie
One-half ounce lime syrup, 1 teaspoonful acid solution phosphate, 2 dashes angostura bitters, 2 ounces grape juice, 1 dash sherry wine, 1 dash rum, 2 heaping teaspoonfuls powdered sugar, ¼ glass cracked ice. Add soda water in a coarse stream to fill 14-ounce glass. Decorate with orange and pineapple fruit.
A soda-fountain "rickey" of the pre-Prohibition sort: mostly grape juice and lime, with dashes of spirits used as flavouring rather than for strength. Everything here is still obtainable, though two of the ingredients need explaining.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, sodium and magnesium salts, used at the fountain to give a clean sourness that citrus alone does not provide. It is still made for bartenders and cocktail suppliers; a teaspoon is the dose called for here. Lemon juice is not a substitute — it adds flavour where phosphate adds only tartness and a slight mineral bite.
- Lime syrupThe fountain article was a sweetened lime cordial, not fresh juice. Half an ounce is one tablespoon.
- DashesA dash from a fountain bottle is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon, though the fitting varied. Two dashes of bitters and one each of sherry and rum amount to well under a teaspoon of alcohol in a 14-ounce drink.
- The sugar is optional nowTwo heaping teaspoons of powdered sugar on top of lime syrup and two ounces of grape juice reflects a period palate that expected sweetness to carry the drink. Start with one level teaspoon and taste; modern commercial grape juice is already sweet.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain usage this means finely ground sugar for quick dissolving — modern superfine or caster sugar. Confectioners' sugar with cornstarch will cloud the drink.
- Coarse streamFountain syphons had two draws. The coarse stream is the wide, forceful one, aimed to agitate the glass and mix the syrups as it fills. With a bottled soda or a syphon, pour hard down the centre rather than stirring afterwards, which flattens the carbonation.
- Glass and yieldA 14-ounce glass filled a quarter with cracked ice, with the syrups and juice already in it, leaves roughly 7 to 8 ounces for the soda. One drink.
- GarnishAn orange half-wheel and a wedge or spear of pineapple on the rim; canned pineapple was commonly used at fountains and holds its shape better than fresh.
The rickey began as a bar drink — spirit, lime and carbonated water, no sugar — and is generally traced to Washington, D.C., in the 1880s, taking its name from a lobbyist called Colonel Joe Rickey. Soda fountains borrowed the form and inverted it: the lime and the soda stayed, the spirit shrank to a dash for aroma, and sugar and fruit juice moved to the centre. Grape juice was the fashionable fountain flavour of the period, promoted heavily as a wholesome and temperate alternative to wine, which explains a drink that gestures at sherry and rum while remaining, in practice, a soft drink. The dispenser's manuals of the era are full of such hybrids, aimed at customers who wanted the vocabulary of the bar in a room that did not have one; the borrowed "Manhattan" in the title is doing the same work as the two dashes of bitters.