Home › At the Fountain › Siberian Freeze
Siberian Freeze
One-half tumblerful shaved ice, 1 ounce claret syrup, 1 teaspoonful lemon juice, ½ orange, 1 teaspoonful powdered sugar. Fill with plain soda. Stir with spoon and add 1 slice pineapple and 1 sprig of mint. Serve with straws.
A fountain drink built in the glass, essentially a claret lemonade lengthened with soda water. Nothing is cooked, so the only things worth translating are the vessels and the syrup.
- Tumbler sizeSoda-fountain tumblers of this period ran roughly 8 to 12 ounces, so half a tumbler of shaved ice is somewhere around 4 to 6 ounces by volume, packed loosely rather than crushed to slush.
- Claret syrupFountain claret syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured and coloured to suggest red Bordeaux; formulas varied, some using real claret and others substituting grape juice with acid, so alcohol content was inconsistent. A modern substitute is a red-wine or grape syrup reduced with sugar to a pourable, not sticky, consistency.
- "Plain soda"Unflavored carbonated water, drawn hard from the fountain. Bottled club soda or seltzer works, but pour it down the side of the glass so the carbonation survives the stirring.
- The half orangeMost likely the juice, squeezed straight in over the ice, rather than a fruit half dropped in the glass, though the text does not say. Half an orange gives roughly 1½ to 2 tablespoons.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain usage this is fine granulated or superfine sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine dissolves cleanly in cold liquid; confectioners' sugar will cloud the drink.
- Order of workThe original fills with soda and then stirs. If the sugar settles, combine syrup, juices and sugar with the ice first and stir before the soda goes in; after the soda, one gentle turn of the spoon is enough.
- GarnishThe recipe says only a slice of pineapple; canned pineapple in syrup was common at the fountain, and fresh works and is less sweet. Slap the mint sprig once between the palms before setting it in to release the oil.
- YieldOne glass. Scale by the drink rather than by the batch, since the ice and soda proportions are what make it drink well.
The American soda fountain ran on a shelf of colored syrups, and claret syrup was among the most useful of them: it gave the look and much of the flavor of a wine punch to a drink sold in a drugstore, in towns where a bar was either absent or disreputable. Fanciful cold-weather names were a house specialty of the trade, and "Siberian" here does no more than advertise the shaved ice. The bones of the drink are older than the fountain: claret cup and claret lemonade, red wine with lemon, sugar and fruit, were standard summer refreshments in English and American households through the nineteenth century, and the dispenser's version simply swapped the wine for syrup and the still water for charged.