Home › At the Fountain › Seltzer Lemonade
Seltzer Lemonade
Juice of 1 lemon, 1 tablespoonful powdered sugar, ¼ glass cracked ice. Stir with spoon and fill with seltzer water. Stir again, strain and serve with straws.
A fountain-counter lemonade, built in the glass rather than mixed ahead. Almost nothing here needs translating, but a few fountain conventions are worth spelling out.
- The glassSoda fountain glasses of this era ran in the 8-12 oz range; the recipe does not say. A quarter glass of cracked ice in a glass that size is on the order of 2-3 oz by volume, with the seltzer filling the remainder.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain usage this means finely granulated or superfine sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine dissolves cleanly in cold lemon juice; modern powdered sugar will cloud the drink and add a faint starch flavor.
- Seltzer, not club sodaFountain seltzer was plain carbonated water, charged hard. Club soda carries added sodium salts that read as slightly saline against lemon. Use seltzer or unflavored sparkling water, and use it very cold so it holds its gas.
- Stir first, then chargeDissolve the sugar into the juice with the ice before the water goes in. Stirring after the seltzer knocks the carbonation out, so the second stir should be one or two turns, no more.
- Strain, then serveThe recipe has you strain off the cracked ice before serving. If you would rather keep it cold longer, serve over fresh ice instead of the ice it was mixed on, which will be watery.
- Yield and balanceOne drink. A lemon gives 2-3 tablespoons of juice depending on size; if yours is small, add a second one rather than more sugar, since the drink is meant to be sharp.
Soda fountains grew out of nineteenth-century pharmacy, where carbonated water was dispensed as a health tonic and the syrups came later to make it palatable. By the time books like this one were printed, the fountain had become a commercial trade with its own vocabulary of glasses, shakes, phosphates and lemonades, and a dispenser was expected to build a drink to order in front of the customer in seconds. Seltzer lemonade is the plainest thing on the list, the fountain's answer to still lemonade, and its inclusion says less about invention than about the counterman's need for a fast, cheap drink using only the lemon, the sugar bin and the charged-water tap already at hand.