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Orange Frappe
Glass half full fine ice, tablespoonful powdered sugar, ½ ounce orange syrup, 2 dashes lemon syrup, dash prepared raspberry, ¼ ounce acid solu-syrup, dash prepared raspberry, 14 ounce acid solution phosphates. Fill with soda and stir well, strain into a mineral glass and serve.
A fountain drink rather than a frozen dessert: everything is built over shaved ice, charged with soda water, then strained away from the ice into a fresh glass. The whole thing takes under a minute at the counter.
- What "frappe" means hereIn soda-fountain usage the term usually indicates a drink chilled hard against fine ice; here it is strained off the ice, so it reaches the glass cold and clear rather than served over the working ice.
- Fine iceShaved or finely crushed ice, not cubes. Cubes will not chill fast enough in the few seconds the drink spends in the mixing glass, and they will not strain cleanly.
- A dashA small unmeasured pull from a fountain syrup dispenser; the volume is not specified here, so two dashes of lemon amount only to a small fraction of an ounce. Measure rather than shake a modern bottle, which pours far more.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to fountains as a sharpener that gives tartness without fruit flavour. It is still made for cocktail and soda use; a few drops go a long way and it is not interchangeable with lemon juice.
- Prepared raspberryFountain shorthand for a raspberry syrup already blended and strained for dispensing, used here as a colouring and rounding note rather than a flavour in its own right. A single dash of any good raspberry syrup does the job.
- Powdered sugarNineteenth-century powdered sugar is finely ground sugar, closer to today's superfine than to cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar. Superfine dissolves in the cold liquid without clouding it.
- SodaFountain soda was drawn under pressure with force, which did the mixing. From a siphon or a bottle, pour down the side and stir briskly but briefly so the drink keeps its gas.
- Glass and yieldA mineral glass is a tumbler in roughly the eight-to-ten-ounce range, though sizes varied. The recipe makes one drink.
- An unclear measureThe acid phosphate quantity in the original is not legible with confidence. Treat it as a small measure -- a quarter ounce at most -- and taste before adding more, since phosphate turns aggressive quickly.
Soda fountains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran on a small vocabulary of bottled bases: fruit syrups, "prepared" fruits already sweetened and strained, and acid phosphate, the tart non-fruit sharpener that gave fountain drinks their characteristic bite and separated them from plain sweetened soda. Dispenser manuals like this one were written for the working clerk, who was expected to know what a dash and a mineral glass were, and who built dozens of near-identical formulas by varying the syrup and the acid. The raspberry dash here is doing what a bartender's bitters do -- adding colour and a little complication to what would otherwise taste flatly of one fruit. The trade generally credits the spread of acid phosphate to pharmacist-run fountains, where the soda counter grew out of the dispensing counter and the same shelves supplied both.