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Pepto Limetta
One-half ounce lime juice, ½ ounce lemon syrup, 1 dram essence of pepsin. Stir while adding hot water.
A hot fountain drink from the era when the soda counter sat inside a drugstore and half the menu was aimed at the stomach rather than the palate. Two of the three ingredients are straightforward; the third is a pharmacy preparation you will not find today.
- The measuresHalf an ounce is one tablespoon, so equal tablespoons of lime juice and lemon syrup. A fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly 3.7 mL or a scant three-quarter teaspoon.
- Essence of pepsinA druggist's preparation of the digestive enzyme pepsin, obtained from pig stomach lining and carried in a sweetened syrup, in some formulas with alcohol. It was stocked as a dyspepsia remedy rather than as a flavouring, and has no modern counterpart on a grocery shelf. Left out, the drink loses little, though some essences were aromatic and a trace of flavour goes with it.
- It would not have worked anywayIt would not have worked well anyway -- Pepsin is inactivated by heat and needs strongly acid conditions to act. Stirring it into hot water would have destroyed much of the enzyme before it was swallowed.
- Lemon syrupFountain lemon syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, commonly in the region of two parts sugar to one of water, flavoured with lemon juice, citric acid and/or oil of lemon depending on the formula. Bottled lemon cordials sold today are far weaker; a homemade 2:1 syrup with the zest steeped in it is closer.
- Water and glassThe recipe specifies only hot water. Hot fountain drinks were generally drawn very hot into a small mug; filling to about six ounces over the tablespoon of juice and tablespoon of syrup gives a properly tart drink.
- YieldOne serving.
Soda fountains in the United States grew out of pharmacies, and well into the twentieth century their menus carried a run of drinks pitched squarely at indigestion: pepsin phosphates, celery tonics, bromo preparations and hot lemonades. Pepsin was identified and named in the 1830s and by the 1890s was a fashionable proprietary remedy, sold as an elixir or essence and worked into products from chewing gum to bottled soft drinks; the Pepsi-Cola name is usually connected to pepsin or dyspepsia, though the link is not firmly documented. "Limetta" is a Latin-derived name for the lime, used here as the sort of dressed-up fountain naming applied to a drink of lime juice and sugar. Served hot, it belongs to the winter side of the fountain trade, when the same counter that sold ice cream sodas in July needed something warm to sell in January.