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Menthe-Ade
Mineral glass ¼ full of crushed ice, 2 teaspoonfuls powdered sugar, ¼ ounce creme de menthe syrup, 1 ounce Roman punch syrup. Draw full with coarse soda stream and serve with straws.
A fountain drink built in the glass and finished with carbonated water. Nothing here is alcoholic despite the names — both syrups were flavoring concentrates sold to soda dispensers.
- Mineral glassA tall fountain glass used for soda draughts; sizes varied from house to house, so the exact capacity is not recoverable. Quarter-filling it with crushed ice leaves the rest of the glass for the soda stream.
- Crème de menthe syrupNot the liqueur. Fountain crème de menthe was a green peppermint syrup, sugar-based and alcohol-free. A quarter ounce is about a half tablespoon — a small amount, since peppermint oil dominates quickly.
- Roman punch syrupA fountain syrup, usually lemon and orange with rum flavoring or rum essence, sometimes tinted. No modern equivalent is sold under the name; a lemon syrup with a drop of rum extract is the closest approximation.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain usage this meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar sold today. Two teaspoons of plain sugar will sit in the bottom of the glass unless the drink is agitated; a tablespoon or so of simple syrup dissolves cleanly instead.
- Coarse streamFountain draught arms offered a coarse stream and a fine one. The coarse stream delivered a fat, heavy jet that churned the syrups up through the ice and mixed the glass without a spoon. From a home siphon or bottle, pour hard down the centre and then stir once.
- YieldOne glass. Serve immediately with straws, while the carbonation is still lively.
Soda fountains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries built an entire vocabulary out of borrowed drink names — menthe, punch, sherry cobbler, claret phosphate — with the alcohol replaced by flavored syrups. Roman punch was originally a boozy citrus ice served between courses at formal dinners, and its fountain namesake kept the lemon-and-rum profile while dropping the spirit and the freezing. The result was a drink that let a customer order something with the flourish of a cocktail across a marble counter, which mattered a good deal in an era when temperance sentiment was strong and the drugstore fountain was the respectable alternative to the saloon. The "-ade" suffix is often taken to suggest a sweetened, iced, soda-lengthened drink in the lemonade family rather than a soda proper or a phosphate, though fountain naming was inconsistent enough that the categories blurred in practice.