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Spanish Lemonade
The juice of 1½ an orange, the juice of 1½ lemon, 1½ tablespoonfuls sugar, I scoop of crushed ice, and water to fill a large glass.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: it assumes a soda jerk with a syrup rail, a shaved-ice bin and a 12-ounce glass at hand. A few of the quantities as printed need reading with care.
- The fractions are unreliableThe fractions as printed are unreliable -- "The juice of 1½ an orange" and "1½ lemon" read like garbled settings of "½ an orange" and "½ lemon," with the capital I in "I scoop" standing in for the numeral 1. Read as half an orange and half a lemon, that is roughly a tablespoon or two of juice each against one glass of water, though the placement of the stray figure cannot be recovered with certainty.
- How much sugar"½ tablespoonfuls sugar" appears garbled too. For a drink of this size, something in the region of a tablespoon is a sensible starting point; add more after tasting.
- Dissolving itGranulated sugar dissolves poorly in ice water however hard it is stirred. Sugar syrup, kept ready and cooled, is the easier route; use enough to match the sweetness you want, bearing in mind syrup carries less sugar per spoonful than the dry sugar it replaces.
- A scoop of crushed iceThe measure is left to the operator's scoop. Crushed rather than cubed matters here: it chills fast and dilutes the drink as it sits.
- A large glassThe size is not stated; fill whatever tall glass you use with cold water over the juice and ice, as the recipe directs.
- YieldOne drink. It does not hold; the juice dulls within an hour, so squeeze to order.
Soda-fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran to hundreds of numbered formulas, and the naming was frankly promotional: a plain lemonade became Egyptian, Russian, Turkish or Spanish according to whichever addition distinguished it that week. What "Spanish" was meant to signal is not recoverable from the formula itself. The genre matters more than the individual formula. The dispensing fountain turned the drugstore into a social room, and its operators worked from printed formularies, standardising drinks so that a customer in one town got roughly what he expected in another. Recipes were written telegraphically, in scoops and dashes and "a large glass," because they were meant for a man who already had the tools in front of him rather than for a household cook.