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Rospho
Raspberry syrup, ¾ ounce; orange syrup, ¾ ounce; prepared lemon syrup, 1 ounce; prepared lime syrup, ¼ ounce; acid solution phosphate, ½ teaspoonful; cracked ice, ½ glass. Mix in 14-ounce straight lemonade glass. Decorate with ½ slice of pineapple and orange.
A fountain phosphate built on four fruit syrups, from the era when a soda clerk kept a dozen labeled pumps within arm's reach. Everything here can still be assembled at home with bottled syrups and a siphon or seltzer.
- Acid phosphate"Acid solution phosphate" is the fountain's acid phosphate: a dilute phosphoric acid preparation, usually carrying calcium, magnesium and potassium phosphates as well, and still sold under that name. It gives a dry, mineral tartness that citrus juice does not, and half a teaspoon is the whole point of the drink; without it this is only sweet fruit soda.
- Prepared syrups"Prepared" lemon and lime syrup appears to mean the fountain's made-up stock syrup rather than a plain sugar syrup. Any good bottled lemon or lime cordial stands in; unsweetened juice does not, since the sugar is carrying the drink.
- OuncesAll the syrup measures are fluid ounces: three-quarters of an ounce is one and a half tablespoons, a quarter ounce is half a tablespoon. Reading the orange syrup's printed "34 ounce" as 3/4, the total syrup comes to about two and three-quarter ounces.
- The glassA 14-ounce straight lemonade glass is a tall, untapered tumbler close to a modern Collins glass. With the syrup and half a glass of cracked ice in place, carbonated water fills whatever remains.
- Carbonated waterFountain formulas of this kind assumed the clerk would draw soda into the glass as a matter of course. Add the syrups and acid phosphate first, then fill with cold carbonated water and stir just enough to combine, so the carbonation survives.
- IceCracked ice, not cubes: it chills fast. Crush or crack the ice rather than shaving it, or the drink waters down before it reaches the table.
- YieldOne tall glass.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of invented one-word names like this, coined to give a druggist's counter something no rival counter had; the drinks themselves were often permutations of the same rack of fruit syrups plus acid phosphate. Phosphates were a staple fountain category, quicker than an egg drink or an ice cream soda, and acid phosphate's arrival in American pharmacies as a tonic preparation, before it settled into use as a souring agent, is generally traced to Horsford's Acid Phosphate of the 1870s. Pineapple was shipped and canned in quantity by then, and the fruit garnish suggests a drink sold partly on its presentation.