Home › At the Fountain › Neapolitan
Neapolitan
One ounce Catawba wine, ½ ounce pineapple syrup, 1 ½ ounces lime juice, ½ ounce lemon syrup, ¼ glass cracked ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A pre-Prohibition fountain mixed drink, built like a sour and served without soda water. It comes together in under a minute once the ingredients are on hand.
- The measuresOunces here are fluid ounces, and the whole drink is only about 3½ ounces of liquid before dilution. It is meant as a small, sharp glass, not a tumbler.
- "¼ glass cracked ice"Fountain glasses of the period varied, but on the order of 8 to 10 ounces, which would put this at roughly 2 to 2½ ounces of ice, cracked rather than cubed so it chills and dilutes fast in a short shake.
- Catawba wineA still or sparkling white wine from the native American Catawba grape, foxy and floral with high acid. Bottlings still exist from Ohio and the Finger Lakes; failing that, an off-dry Riesling or a Niagara comes closest in character.
- "Lime juice" is ambiguousFountain manuals of the period used the term for both fresh juice and the sweetened bottled lime cordial then common. At 1½ ounces against only an ounce of syrup, fresh juice makes a very tart drink; either could be meant, and the recipe does not say which.
- The syrupsPineapple and lemon syrups were the fountain's standard flavouring stock: sugar syrup, generally much heavier than modern simple syrup, flavoured with juice or extract. Modern 1:1 simple syrup infused with the fruit will be noticeably thinner and less sweet.
- "Toss"The instruction is unclear. It may mean pouring the strained drink between two vessels to aerate it, but that reading is not certain. In either case it follows the shake rather than replacing it.
- No sodaNothing here is carbonated; the drink is shaken, strained and served as it is.
- YieldOne drink, about 4 ounces after dilution. Serve in a small chilled glass, straight up.
Soda fountains before Prohibition were not teetotal establishments, and wine-based fountain drinks like this one sat comfortably alongside phosphates and egg creams in the trade manuals. Catawba was the obvious wine to reach for: a native American grape widely planted in Ohio and in the Finger Lakes in the nineteenth century, and the basis of the sparkling wines that made Cincinnati briefly famous as a wine town. Its foxy, grapey aroma and bracing acidity made it more useful behind a counter than a European wine would have been, since it stood up to sweet syrups. The name Neapolitan is probably decorative rather than descriptive — there is nothing particularly Neapolitan about the ingredients — though the reasoning behind it can only be guessed at. National Prohibition put an end to this whole family of drinks, and the fountain emerged from it selling nothing stronger than a phosphate.