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Soda Cocktail
Four drams lemon syrup, 1 dram lemon juice, 1 dram angostura bitters, fill with coarse stream and add teaspoonful powdered sugar. Soda Foam (Liquid)-American. (See also Foam.) Mix thoroughly ½ ounce or more in each gallon of flavored syrup, according to the amount of foam desired.
A fountain formula written for someone standing at a marble counter with a syrup rack and a two-stream draft arm. Translated into cups and spoons it is a short, bracing lemon-and-bitters soda.
- Drams are fluid dramsA fluid dram is 1/8 fluid ounce, roughly 3/4 teaspoon. So this is about 1/2 oz (1 tablespoon) lemon syrup, 3/4 teaspoon lemon juice and 3/4 teaspoon Angostura.
- That is a real dose of bittersThree-quarters of a teaspoon of Angostura is far more than the two dashes a bar cocktail gets, and it will read as strongly medicinal and spicy; scale back to 3 or 4 dashes if you want it merely aromatic.
- "Coarse stream"Fountain arms had a fine stream for mixing and a coarse (heavy) stream for filling. Use plain soda water poured hard down the centre of the glass; the recipe does not specify a glass, but a soda glass of roughly 8 to 10 oz suits these proportions.
- The sugar goes in last, on purposeThe sugar goes in last -- Powdered sugar dropped onto charged water gives the carbonation something to break out on and throws up a head of foam. Add it after filling and do not stir it away.
- Lemon syrupFountain lemon syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with lemon oil and acid, not lemonade. A syrup made with roughly twice the weight of sugar to water, with a strip of zest steeped in it, comes closer; bottled lemonade concentrate is too thin and too tart.
- No alcohol in itBitters aside, this is a soft drink. The name borrows the bar's prestige, not its contents.
- The second paragraph is not part of the drink"Soda Foam (Liquid)" is a separate entry: a commercial foaming concentrate, historically a saponin extract from quillaia bark or yucca, blended into bulk syrup at half an ounce or more per gallon, as the entry says. It belongs to fountain trade practice rather than to this glass, and it is not something to improvise.
- YieldOne glass. Build it in the glass in the order given; there is nothing to shake.
The soda cocktail belongs to the American drugstore fountain of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when dispensers openly imitated the saloon's repertoire, borrowing its vocabulary of cocktails, fizzes, sours and cobblers while keeping the glass alcohol-free. Angostura bitters, produced in Venezuela and later Trinidad by the Siegert family, sat comfortably on a pharmacy shelf, since it was sold as a stomachic tonic as much as a flavouring. Formula books like this one existed because the fountain clerk was compounding to order all day and needed everything expressed in the apothecary units already on his graduated glasses, which may account for measurements given in drams rather than spoons. The powdered sugar at the end and the trade foaming liquids in the neighbouring entry point to the same preoccupation: at the fountain, a lively head of foam was proof that the soda was properly charged.