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Royal Celery Phosphate
Make ordinary lemon phosphate and add 2 or 3 dashes of Royal Celery Bitters. Stir well and serve.
A two-ingredient fountain drink that assumes you already keep the fountain's standard stock at hand. Almost everything you need to know is in what the original leaves out.
- What a phosphate isNot a soda flavour but a soured one: an ounce or so of flavouring syrup, a few dashes of acid phosphate, and carbonated water drawn over it. Acid phosphate (a dilute phosphoric acid solution, sold as Horsford's in this period and again today) gives a dry, mineral tartness that citrus juice does not.
- Lemon phosphate, builtFountain manuals of the period vary, but a workable build is about 1 to 1 1/4 oz lemon syrup and 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon acid phosphate in a 10 to 12 oz glass, then fill with cold soda water. Fountain lemon syrup was generally simple syrup with lemon extract or juice, and sweeter than a modern cordial.
- DashesBy the usual modern reckoning a dash is about 1/8 teaspoon, so 2 or 3 dashes is roughly 1/4 to 3/8 teaspoon. Start at two; celery bitters are savoury and assertive and will take over the glass.
- Royal Celery BittersEvidently a proprietary brand of the soda-fountain era, no longer available. A current celery bitters is the obvious substitute; most are built on celery seed with supporting root and spice.
- Stir well, and whyBitters are alcohol-based and will sit on top of a carbonated drink in streaks. Stir with a long spoon from the bottom, once or twice only, or you will lose the carbonation you just added.
- Order of operationsSyrup and phosphate first, soda last, so the drink mixes as the glass fills.
- YieldOne glass. The recipe is written as a bar call, not a batch.
Celery was taken seriously as a medicinal in the late nineteenth century, credited with calming the nerves and settling the stomach, and it turned up in tonics, extracts and bitters sold through drugstores — which is precisely where American soda fountains lived. A druggist already stocking celery preparations had little trouble dashing the same flavour into a glass of charged water, and the phosphate, with its dry mineral bite, suited a drink that should taste like a remedy rather than a treat. The idea outlived the pharmacy: celery soda persisted commercially in the northeastern United States, most familiarly as Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray, long marketed with the delicatessen trade. The "Royal" here appears to be a brand name, of the sort fountain manuals of the era routinely name-checked, and the recipe's brevity shows how much a soda book could assume about the shelf behind the marble counter.