Home › At the Fountain › Mystic Blue Blaze
Mystic Blue Blaze
Four and one-half ounces grape juice, 1½ ounces claret syrup, 1 ounce lime juice, 1 dram alcohol, a dash of bitters. Heat the grape juice in a tin cup or any small vessel by aid of an alcohol or gas stove, allowing it to boil To dispense, it is necessary to have two 8-ounce silver mugs, pour the hot grape juice into one of them, adding the dram of alcohol on top carefully not to mix it. Ignite the alcohol with a match and pour the blazing from one mug to the other. Add the claret syrup and lime juice and a slice of lemon. With a little practice the operator can learn to dispense this drink in a very attractive manner, which, of course, adds to the pull a store has with its patrons. The price is 20 cents.
A fountain showpiece rather than a mixing job: the flame is the product, and the drink assembles around it. Nearly all the work is in handling the burning spirit safely.
- The measurementsA dram here is a fluid dram, one-eighth of a fluid ounce, or a scant 3/4 teaspoon. With 4½ ounces grape juice, 1½ ounces claret syrup and 1 ounce lime juice, the finished drink comes to about 7 ounces, one serving in the 8-ounce mug specified.
- What "alcohol" must meanUse only a potable high-proof spirit — overproof rum or a 151-plus neutral spirit. Fountain back-rooms also stocked denatured and rubbing alcohol for lamps and cleaning, and neither is drinkable at any dilution. If there is any doubt about what is in the bottle, do not put it in the mug.
- Why the grape juice is boiledA cold or lukewarm base will not keep three-quarters of a teaspoon of spirit alight for the length of a pour. The heat is what vaporises enough alcohol to sustain the flame, so the juice needs to be genuinely at a boil when it goes into the mug.
- Claret syrupA fountain syrup flavoured and coloured to suggest red Bordeaux; period formulas ranged from wine-based to purely imitation, and it is not something you will find on a shelf today. Red wine reduced with sugar to a light syrup, or a tart blackcurrant or grape syrup, gets you to the same place.
- Order of operationsSyrup, lime juice and lemon slice go in only after the flaming is finished. Cold syrup poured into a burning mug kills the flame, and citrus oil near an open flame flares.
- The mugsSilver conducts heat straight to the hand. Metal mugs with insulated or long handles, on a bare heatproof surface, well away from anything that can catch. Keep a lid or a metal pan within reach to smother the flame, and never top up from the spirit bottle while anything is lit.
- The bittersA dash, added with the syrup. Aromatic bitters of the Angostura type are the closest current equivalent to what a fountain would have had on the shelf.
Soda fountain manuals of the early twentieth century were written for operators competing on spectacle as much as flavour, and this drink is frankly sold as theatre — the text ends not with a taste note but with the observation that showmanship "adds to the pull a store has with its patrons," and with a price. Its ingredients are a period signature: grape juice and "claret syrup" gave a temperance-minded clientele the colour and suggestion of red wine without the wine, a trade that grew steadily through the decades of local prohibition and the national ban that followed. The dram of spirit is a lighting agent, not a measure of drink, and hot fountain beverages like this one were winter items, meant to fill the months when nobody wanted an ice cream soda. Names of this kind — mystic, blazing, blue — belong to a genre of fountain nomenclature in which the title was part of the display.