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Sunset
Juice of 1 lemon, 1 teaspoonful powdered sugar, ½ ounce lemon syrup. Mix all in shaker, add 8-ounce glass almost full shaved ice and plain water, shake, strain into glass, pour carefully down side of glass enough blackberry wine to fill top half-inch of glass, top with slice of orange, serve with straw, do not stir.
A fountain drink built for looks: a lemonade shaken cold, then capped with a dark float that gives the glass its sunset gradient. The whole point is the layer, so nearly every instruction serves that.
- Do not stir, and mean itThe blackberry wine, poured carefully down the inside of the glass, sits on top as a distinct band. Any agitation — including a vigorous straw — turns the drink a uniform muddy pink.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn fountain manuals of this era powdered sugar means finely ground granulated, close to today's caster or superfine sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar carries cornstarch, which will cloud the lemonade.
- Lemon syrupFountain lemon syrup was a sweetened lemon concentrate kept on hand all day. A half ounce is one tablespoon; a scant tablespoon of simple syrup with a little extra lemon juice stands in for it.
- "Plain water" means still waterAt a soda fountain, plain water was drawn from the water tap rather than the carbonated draught. This drink is not meant to fizz.
- Blackberry wineA sweet, deeply colored fruit wine, still sold by small wineries; a blackberry cordial or crème de mûre works for color and sweetness but is considerably stronger. The amount here is small — a half-inch in an 8-ounce glass, on the order of an ounce — but it is alcohol, so this is not a children's drink.
- YieldOne 8-ounce glass. Strain the shaken lemonade into the glass, leave headroom for the float, and add the orange slice last so it does not push the layers together.
Soda fountain manuals ran on a small set of interchangeable parts — fruit syrups, shaved ice, plain and carbonated water, a shaker — and the dispenser's art lay in arrangement rather than invention. Drinks like this one were named for what they looked like in the glass: the red-purple wine bleeding down into pale yellow lemonade, with an orange slice for the sun. Fruit wines and cordials appear routinely in these books, and their use here is decorative as much as anything: a float of dark wine was one of the few ways to get a sharp color break in a tall glass. The instruction not to stir is the recipe's real substance, and it marks the drink as something to be looked at before it is drunk.