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Menthe Fresher
Crush fresh mint leaves with small amount of granulated sugar, add 4 ounces shaved ice, 2 ounces almond cream syrup and 4 ounces Apollinaris water. Shake, strain and fill with Apollinaris.
A fountain drink built in a shaker and finished in the glass. Everything hinges on how gently you treat the mint.
- Crush, don't pulverizePress the leaves against the sugar crystals just until they smell strongly of mint, six or eight turns. Shredding them is generally held to make the drink bitter, and shaking with ice afterward will already bruise them further.
- How much mint and sugarThe original gives neither. Eight to ten spearmint leaves and a rounded teaspoon of granulated sugar suits the 2 ounces of syrup here; more sugar and the drink turns cloying, since the syrup is already sweet.
- Apollinaris waterA naturally carbonated German mineral water from the Ahr valley, still sold and still fairly mineral-forward. Any dry, hard sparkling water works; skip the soft, faintly sweet ones, which flatten the mint.
- Almond cream syrupFountain trade language for a heavy-bodied almond syrup. Orgeat is the closest thing on shelves now. If yours is thin, use the full 2 ounces; a dense modern orgeat can go at 1 1/2.
- Ounces are fluid ouncesRead the ice the same way: four ounces of shaved ice is roughly half a cup, loosely packed, and it is there to chill and dilute in the shaker rather than to fill the glass.
- Shaved, not cubedShaved ice melts fast and gives the drink its intended dilution during a short shake. With cubes, shake ten seconds longer or the result reads as syrupy.
- Strain, then chargeStrain out the ice and leaves so the carbonation from the finishing pour survives. Adding sparkling water to a shaker before shaking, as written, does cost some fizz.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 ounces after the top-up: one tall glass.
Menthe is simply French for mint. Fountain books of the early twentieth century are full of alcohol-free constructions with continental names, sold across a marble counter to customers who wanted the glamour of a cocktail list without the bar. Apollinaris, bottled at a spring in the German Ahr valley and marketed in English-speaking countries as the "Queen of Table Waters," was a prestige mixer of the period and turns up in fountain formulas where a recipe wants a drier, more mineral lift than the fountain's own carbonated water could give.