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Siberian Flip (Shaved Ice tumblerful Orange)
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Orange Syrup, 1 ounce; Pineapple Syrup, 1 ounce; Acid Phosphate, from essence bottle, 1 dram; Angostura Bitters, from essence bottle, 2 drops. Shake well, and fill glass with soda water. Add a very thin slice of orange and pineapple, and serve with two straws in a 12-ounce glass.
A soda fountain formula rather than a bar drink — despite the name there is no egg and no spirit in it. Nearly everything translates directly; the one genuinely obsolete component is the acid phosphate.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, used at the fountain to give a dry, tart bite without the fruit flavour of citric acid. It disappeared with the soda fountain but is made again by a few specialist producers; lemon juice is not a substitute, since it adds flavour and sweetness the drink is not built for.
- A dramA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly 3/4 teaspoon or 3.7 ml.
- Essence bottleA small stoppered bottle used at the fountain to dispense flavourings and bitters in small measures; the recipe calls for a dram of one and a counted two drops of the other. For the bitters, two drops means two actual drops, not two dashes from a modern Angostura bottle, which are larger.
- TumblerfulThe tumbler's capacity is not stated. If it is the 12-ounce glass named at the end, half a tumblerful of shaved ice would be about 6 ounces by volume, loosely packed; a smaller tumbler would give correspondingly less.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved or finely crushed ice is what makes the drink work: it chills fast and lets the charged water foam up through it. Cubes give you a thin, flat drink with the syrup sitting on the bottom.
- Soda waterFountain soda was generally more heavily charged than bottled club soda. Use the coldest, most aggressively carbonated seltzer available, and pour down the side of the glass after shaking rather than into the shaker.
- Order of workShake the ice, syrups, phosphate and bitters together, turn the lot into the serving glass, then charge with soda. Shaking after the soda goes in defeats the point.
- YieldOne 12-ounce glass. The two ounces of syrup make it noticeably sweet by current taste; a quarter-ounce less of the pineapple keeps the phosphate bite forward.
The soda fountain borrowed freely from the bar, and "flip" is one of the borrowings — at the tavern a flip was a heated, sweetened mixture of ale or spirit, often with egg, sometimes stirred with a red-hot iron. By the late nineteenth century fountain dispensers were using the word loosely, and this formula has neither egg nor spirit. What the Siberian tag refers to is not recorded; the shaved ice is the obvious guess. What makes the formula a fountain drink rather than a cocktail is the acid phosphate, a druggist's preparation that gave sharpness without alcohol; American soda fountains grew out of pharmacies, and the dispenser worked from stoppered essence bottles measured in drams and drops as he would have filled a prescription.