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Mexican Moselle
One ounce of moselle syrup, juice of 1 orange, ¼ glass shaved ice, few drops peppermint essence. Twelve-ounce glass. Fill with coarse stream, add slice of pineapple or crushed pineapple. Straws.
A fountain drink built in the glass, not shaken or stirred at length — the carbonation does the mixing. The whole thing depends on syrup strength and on how hard you draw the soda.
- Moselle syrupA fountain syrup flavored to suggest Moselle wine, containing no alcohol; the exact compound varied by manufacturer. White grape syrup, or a thick simple syrup steeped with white grape juice and a strip of lemon zest, is a reasonable stand-in.
- "Coarse stream"Fountain taps had a fine stream and a coarse stream. Coarse gave a fat, low-pressure gush of carbonated water for filling and lifting; fine gave a hard needle jet for whipping syrups into foam. Here you want the coarse: pour soda water in from a few inches up so it turns the glass over on itself.
- Peppermint essenceOld essences varied wildly in strength, and some were oil-based rather than alcoholic. Modern peppermint extract is potent — two drops in twelve ounces is already assertive, four is medicinal. Add it to the syrup before the soda so it disperses.
- Quarter glass of shaved iceAbout 3 ounces by volume in a 12-ounce glass. Shaved, not cubed: it chills fast and gives the drink the slushy body the original assumes. Crushed ice from a bag works if you drain the meltwater off first.
- The orangeOne juiced orange is roughly 2 to 3 ounces, which with the ounce of syrup and the quarter-glass of ice leaves you filling only about 5 to 6 ounces with soda. A sweeter modern navel will unbalance it; a Valencia has the acid the drink needs against the syrup.
- Order of buildSyrup, juice, and essence first, then ice, then soda last, following the order the recipe lists.
- The pineappleCrushed pineapple was a fountain staple, generally kept preserved in a covered jar. Canned crushed pineapple, drained, gives the same effect; a slice was the fancier presentation. It is garnish and it is also the last few spoonfuls of the drink.
- YieldOne twelve-ounce glass, one drink.
Soda fountain menus of the early twentieth century were full of drinks named for wines and liqueurs — Moselle, sherry, claret, crème de menthe — none of which contained a drop of alcohol. The syrups were flavor compounds sold by the same supply houses that sold the marble counters and the carbonators, and the names did double duty: they told the customer what to expect on the tongue and lent the glass a faint air of the saloon. "Mexican" here is doing similar work, gesturing at the peppermint and the tropical fruit rather than at any Mexican original; fountain dispensers routinely attached place names to house combinations, and one might guess that the same formula could appear as Spanish, Cuban, or Hawaiian something-or-other in a rival book. Such syrups were already well established in fountain trade catalogues well before Prohibition, and by the Prohibition years the fountain was the respectable substitute for the bar — same counter, same stools, same theatrical build in front of the customer, with carbonated water in place of gin.