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Orangeade
American Orangeade makes a delicious hot soda drink, and one that would pay all our patrons to put on their hot soda fountain. In making hot drinks out of American Orangeade, dilute the concentrated syrup with equal parts plain syrup. Put an ounce in a hot soda mug, fill with hot water and serve. The result will be both pleasing to your patrons and profitable to you.
This is trade copy for a soda fountain, written for someone with a syrup rack and a hot water urn at hand. The proportions still work at home once you know what the two syrups are.
- "American Orangeade" is a branded concentrateIt was a bottled orange syrup base sold to fountains, not a household ingredient. A thick orange syrup made from fresh juice, zest and sugar, or a good commercial orange soda syrup, stands in for it.
- Plain syrup means simple syrupAt the fountain, "plain syrup" or "simple syrup" was sugar dissolved in water, made heavy enough to pour slowly; the exact strength varied from house to house. It is a diluent here, added to stretch the concentrate and sweeten it, not a flavoring.
- The ounce is a fluid ounceOne ounce is two tablespoons of the cut syrup per mug. With a mug of the usual fountain size the finished drink works out at roughly one part syrup to five or seven parts water, depending on the mug.
- Warm the mugThe recipe specifies a "hot soda mug." The phrase may mean the heavy mug used for hot soda service, but pre-rinsing the mug with hot water is sensible either way, since an ounce of cold syrup in a cold vessel will pull the drink's temperature down.
- Adjust to your syrupBecause concentrate strength varied by brand, treat one ounce as a starting point and taste. Diluting the concentrate half and half with plain syrup, as directed, gives you a working syrup you can then measure by the ounce consistently.
- YieldOne mug per ounce of cut syrup. A cup of concentrate plus a cup of simple syrup makes about sixteen servings.
Hot soda was a serious part of the American fountain trade, and this passage may well be read as a piece of the campaign to make it so: fountains sat idle in winter, and syrup houses pushed hot drink service as a way to keep the marble counter earning through the cold months. Hot orangeade, hot lemonade, beef tea, clam bouillon, malted milk and chocolate all appeared on the same winter card, drawn from urns of hot water and served in thick handled mugs rather than glasses. The frank note that the drink will be "profitable to you" is characteristic of the genre -- books like this were written for the proprietor and the apprentice dispenser, and margin was quoted as openly as flavor. The practice of buying a concentrated syrup and cutting it with plain syrup on the premises is the same logic behind modern fountain bag-in-box concentrates.