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Ripe Orange Frappe
Juice of 1 orange, ½ ounce raspberry syrup, 1 dram lemon juice, 1 tablespoonful sugar, ½ glassful shaved ice. About half fill the glass with the coarse stream, stir, strain into a mineral water glass and fill with carbonated water.
A single fountain drink, written for someone standing at a marble counter with a syrup rail and two carbonated-water taps. Translating the equipment is most of the work.
- The coarse streamFountain draft arms gave a fine spray for gentle mixing and a coarse (heavy) stream for agitation. Half-filling with the coarse stream is what dissolves the sugar and whips air into the drink; at home, use a hard pour of well-chilled soda water straight down into the glass.
- A dram of lemon juiceA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon. It is a seasoning amount, meant to sharpen the orange rather than be tasted on its own.
- Half an ounce of syrupFluid ounce, so a tablespoon. Fountain raspberry syrup was generally a heavy sugar syrup rather than a fruit puree; a bar-strength raspberry gomme or a 2:1 sugar syrup infused with raspberries is probably the nearest thing available now.
- Shaved ice, then strained outThe ice is a chilling and dilution tool only. Shaved ice melts fast and gets the drink very cold in seconds, and the whole thing is strained off it into a fresh glass. Cubes will not chill quickly enough in the same time; crush them.
- Glass sizesThe recipe does not say what size glass is meant, and fountain glassware of the period varied; the mineral water glass it is strained into is a tall, thin vessel. The finished volume depends entirely on the glass you use.
- Sugar on top of syrupA tablespoon of dry sugar in addition to the raspberry syrup reads as very sweet now. It was there to balance the acid of a whole orange plus lemon; taste the orange first and cut the sugar if it is a sweet modern navel.
- Frappe, in the fountain senseNot the frozen blended drink the word suggests today. In fountain usage the term generally indicated a drink chilled by agitation with fine ice; here the ice is strained off and nothing is frozen.
- YieldOne drink. Everything in the list scales cleanly if you are making several, but mix and strain them individually so the carbonation is fresh.
American soda-fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser rather than the housekeeper, and they assume a counter fitted with syrup pumps, a shaved-ice bin and a carbonator with fine and coarse draft. Fruit-and-syrup combinations of this kind proliferated in the decades either side of 1900, when the fountain was expanding beyond plain flavored soda into an enormous repertoire of frappes, phosphates, egg drinks and ice-cream sodas, each distinguished by small variations in syrup, acid and method. Raspberry syrup was one of the standard rail bottles, serving here as a coloring and rounding agent, where it tints and softens the orange without displacing it. The word frappe, borrowed from French, meant iced or chilled-by-agitation in fountain usage; its modern American sense of a thick blended drink came later.