Home › At the Fountain › Rose-Ade
Rose-Ade
One ounce lemon syrup, 1 ounce grape juice in mineral glass, fill up with soda, stir well and serve.
A two-syrup fountain drink that assumes a soda spigot and a stock of house syrups. Both are easy to approximate, but the proportions only work if you understand what an "ounce" meant behind the counter.
- The ounce is a fluid ounceFountain measures were liquid, and syrup pumps were commonly set to throw roughly an ounce, though sizes varied. Two ounces of syrup total, so about 2 tablespoons each of lemon syrup and grape juice.
- Mineral glassA fountain glass, smaller and narrower than the glasses used for ice-cream sodas; capacities varied, and something in the 8 to 10 ounce range is a reasonable stand-in. Any tall 8 oz glass works; the drink is one serving.
- Lemon syrupNot lemonade and not modern lemon cordial. Fountain lemon syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with lemon juice and often a little oil of lemon; formulas vary, but something in the region of two parts sugar to one part water gives the right body. Bottled lemonade concentrate is far weaker and will leave the glass thin.
- Grape juiceIn an American soda book of this period this is most likely unfermented Concord grape juice, sweet and strongly foxy in flavour. White or red table-grape juice will taste flatter and give less colour.
- "Soda"Carbonated water straight from the fountain, cold and hard-carbonated. Chilled seltzer poured with a bit of force gives the closest result; the drink relies on the carbonation to lift two ounces of sweet syrup.
- Stir gently, onceThe instruction to stir well is the weak point when you have no fountain. Vigorous stirring in a home glass drives off much of the gas. Add the syrups first, pour the soda onto them so the stream does the mixing, then give one short stir.
- No ice specifiedThe recipe calls for none, and fountain syrups and carbonated water were both kept cold. Chill everything beforehand rather than filling the glass with cubes, which dilutes.
Rose-Ade is lemon syrup cut with Concord grape juice, which comes up a clear pink. Books like this one were trade manuals, written for the dispenser working a marble counter in a drugstore, and their value lay in giving him dozens of sellable combinations out of the same short rank of syrups already on the board. Unfermented grape juice was a fixture of that board in the United States from the late nineteenth century onward, promoted heavily as a temperance drink, and the soda fountain was where much of it was sold by the glass. The formula reflects the economics of the counter as much as taste: two pumps, one glass of soda, a few seconds of work, and a drink with a name that sounded like something more than lemon and grape.