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Maryland Mint Toddy
One-half ounce creme de menthe syrup, 1½ ounce ginger syrup, 1 dash phosphate. Serve in 8-ounce mineral, with ⅔ glass cracked ice. Add sprig fresh mint.
A fountain drink built in the glass, no alcohol anywhere in it despite the name. The whole thing lives or dies on the carbonated water being cold and hard-drawn over the ice.
- "Mineral" means two things here"Mineral" here is the glass -- an 8-ounce mineral is the tall, straight-sided fountain glass. The recipe names no liquid to fill it, so carbonated water from the fountain is the presumed finish, though the original does not say so.
- Creme de menthe syrupA fountain syrup, not the liqueur. It is sugar syrup flavoured with peppermint oil and coloured green; a good peppermint simple syrup does the same job. Half an ounce is one tablespoon.
- Ginger syrupPeriod formularies often built ginger syrup on an alcoholic tincture or fluid extract of ginger stirred into simple syrup, so it carried real heat. A modern ginger syrup made by steeping fresh ginger is closer to it than most bottled cocktail syrups, which lean sweet.
- PhosphateA dash of acid phosphate solution: dilute phosphoric acid partly neutralised with mineral phosphates (calcium and magnesium, and in the best-known brand potassium and iron as well), sold for fountain work and available again from cocktail suppliers. It sharpens sweet syrups without the fruit note of citrus. Never substitute anything sold as phosphoric acid for cleaning or descaling.
- A dashFrom a fountain dasher bottle, on the order of an eighth to a quarter teaspoon. It is a seasoning, not an ingredient; too much makes the drink taste flatly sour.
- IceCracked ice, two-thirds of the glass, as specified. It chills faster than cubes and, unlike crushed ice, melts slowly enough not to water the drink down.
- The mintThe sprig goes in the glass as a garnish. Modern bar practice is to slap it once between the palms first to release the oil.
- YieldOne 8-ounce glass, holding an ounce of syrup in total. With the glass two-thirds full of cracked ice the water added is only a few ounces, so the finished drink is not as diluted as the glass size suggests.
Soda fountains built an entire parallel menu of drinks named after bar drinks they contained none of: toddies, juleps, sours, fizzes, egg nogs. A toddy at the bar was spirits, sugar and water; at the fountain it kept the sugar and water and dropped the spirits, and the name did the rest of the work. The Maryland and Kentucky attachment to mint comes by way of the julep, which was firmly identified with the border and upper South by the mid-nineteenth century. Acid phosphate is the marker of the era here: it was the fountain's house acid from the 1870s onward, cheap, shelf-stable and free of fruit flavour, and it disappeared from soda work almost completely after the middle of the twentieth century before cocktail bartenders went looking for it again.