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Olive Cocktail
Soda water drinkers are always looking for something new. Olives have become very popular now in cocktails, and they can be used as a novelty soda fountains with the following formula. Draw into a soda Champagne Syrup, 1 ounce; Raspberry Syrup, ½ ounce.
Add a little shaved ice, a dash of angostura bitters, a dash of acid phosphate. Mix well with a spoon, and strain into a stem champagne glass and fill with solid soda. Stick stuffed olive on a wooden toothpick and float in the glass. Twist a piece of lemon peel over top of the drink and quickly. An olive may also be used as an addition to a cherry cocktail in place of a maraschino cherry. "Ollie Moore."
One-half ounce lemon syrup, ½ ounce raspberry syrup, 1 ounce orange syrup, 2 ounces sweet cream, i egg, cracked ice. Shake, strain, add toss and serve. This makes a very nice drink.
Two formulas from the fountain trade: an alcohol-free imitation of a bar cocktail, and a shaken egg-cream drink called the "Ollie Moore." The first is straightforward with the right syrups; the second contains a raw egg that is never heated.
- The raw eggThe "Ollie Moore" shakes a whole raw egg with cream and serves it cold and unheated. Shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that shaking does not touch, and the drink is nothing but a warm-weather counter mixed and handed straight over. Consult a current recipe if you want a drink of this style.
- Champagne syrupA fountain staple, not a wine product: a flavouring syrup meant to suggest sparkling wine. Published formulas for it varied, and commercial versions have largely disappeared, so no single modern bottle stands in for it.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, used across the soda counter to give sweet syrups a dry, mineral bite. It is still made in small batches for cocktail bars. A dash means a few drops from a dasher bottle, not a bar spoon.
- "Solid soda"Fountain draught arms could deliver soda as a fine spray or as a coarser, heavier flow; "solid soda" appears to mean the plain carbonated water drawn without the foaming spray, so the glass fills clear rather than heading up.
- Proportions and glassAn ounce and a half of syrup plus bitters and phosphate, topped up in a stemmed champagne glass, gives one small drink; no volume is stated. The shaken formula runs about four ounces of syrup and cream before ice and egg, so it wants a larger glass.
- The stuffed oliveIn 1900s usage this means a green olive pitted and stuffed with pimiento. The olive is garnish only, speared and floated; its brine is never added to the glass.
- Garbled textThe first formula ends "twist a piece of lemon peel over top of the drink and quickly" — a word is missing, probably "serve quickly." In the second, "add toss and serve" looks like a compositor's error, though what was intended is unclear.
Soda fountains of the early twentieth century competed directly with the saloon, and their operators borrowed the bar's vocabulary wholesale: cocktails, bitters, twists of peel, stemmed glassware, all built on flavouring syrups and carbonated water instead of spirits. Angostura bitters and acid phosphate were the two ingredients that made the imitation convincing, supplying the aromatic edge and the dryness that sugar syrup alone could not. The olive garnish here is a fashion note — the stuffed pimiento olive had become the mark of a smart mixed drink, and the dispenser is simply annexing it, as the text says openly, as "a novelty." Egg drinks like the "Ollie Moore" were the other half of the fountain trade, closer to a milkshake than a cocktail and sold as nourishment as much as refreshment; the raw egg beaten into cream and syrup was considered a tonic well into the 1920s.