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Mint and Milk
Mint syrup, ½ ounces; angostura bitters, 1½ dram; milk, 3 ounces. Carbonated water (coarse stream) enough to fill 8-ounce glass. Serve "solid."
A single-glass fountain drink written in the shorthand of a working dispenser. Two of its four instructions are units and jargon rather than technique.
- The measures are fluidA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly 3.7 ml. So 1½ drams of Angostura is about a generous teaspoon — a heavy hand by modern cocktail standards, but it is carrying the whole drink.
- Mint syrupHalf a fluid ounce, one tablespoon. Fountain mint syrup was a plain sugar syrup flavoured with oil of peppermint or spearmint, not the muddled-leaf syrup common now; a commercial peppermint syrup is closer than anything homemade with fresh leaves.
- Coarse streamFountain taps offered a fine (fizzy, aerating) stream and a coarse (heavy, low-agitation) one. Coarse is presumably specified here to avoid whipping the milk into foam. A slow pour of chilled soda water down the side of the glass is the nearest equivalent.
- Served "solid"Fountain slang for a glass filled to the top with liquid and no head of foam. The 8-ounce glass is meant to come out full of drink, not full of froth.
- Acid and milkThe bitters and the carbonic acid both add a little acid to the milk. Build it in the order given, with the syrup and bitters in the glass first and the milk in before the water, and serve at once; left standing it may separate.
- Cold is not optionalFountain milk was generally kept in an iced compartment. Use milk straight from the refrigerator and well-chilled soda water; warm milk tastes flat against the mint.
- YieldOne 8-ounce glass, which works out at about 3 ounces of milk to a little over 4 of soda water. The bitters bring in roughly 2 ml of alcohol — small, but not a trace.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried whole chapters of milk drinks, sold partly as refreshment and partly as something nourishing — the fountain positioned itself as the respectable alternative to the saloon, and a glass with milk in it looked like food. Angostura, a bitters compounded in Venezuela and later Trinidad and marketed hard in the United States as a stomachic, appears constantly in these books precisely because it was shelved as a medicine as much as a flavouring; a dispenser could add it to a drink without the drink becoming a cocktail. Mint carried the same double duty, being traditionally regarded as settling to the stomach. What survives on the page is a small piece of trade vocabulary — "coarse stream," "solid" — that meant nothing to the customer and everything to the man behind the marble counter.