Home › At the Fountain › Tonique Fizz
Tonique Fizz
Fill glass ½ full shaved ice, add white of an egg, 3 spoonfuls powdered sugar, 3 dashes angostura bitters, 4 dashes lime juice, 8 dashes Shake well, pour into 12-ounce bell top glass and fill with vichy in short dashes to make fizz.
A soda-fountain fizz built like a bar drink: shake with egg white, then lengthen with charged water. The text as printed has a gap in it, which is the first thing to sort out.
- The missing ingredient"8 dashes Shake well" is a typesetting casualty — an ingredient name has dropped out between the quantity and the instruction. Given the name of the drink, the likely candidate is a quinine tonic preparation such as elixir of calisaya or a tonic wine, but the original does not say, and nothing on the page settles it.
- Dashes and spoonfulsA dash from a dasher-top bottle is usually reckoned at around 1/8 teaspoon, though fountain practice was not standardised; on that reckoning 4 dashes of lime juice is well under a teaspoon, so this is a faintly tart drink, not a sour. A "spoonful" at the fountain is generally taken to mean the long bar spoon, roughly a teaspoon, which would put the sweetening at about a tablespoon of powdered sugar.
- VichyVichy meant bottled or drawn alkaline mineral water, charged at the fountain. Plain soda water or a mild sparkling mineral water stands in; the point is the carbonation, not the salts.
- Shaved iceShaved ice chills fast and dilutes fast. If you want the drink to hold its head, shake with a couple of large cubes instead and strain them out before the water goes in.
- "Short dashes" of vichyThis is the hinge. The carbonated water is added in a series of quick bursts against the egg-white foam rather than in one pour, which is what raises the fizz to the rim of the glass.
- The glassA 12-ounce bell top is a tall flared soda glass; any 12 oz highball or Collins glass works. Yield is one drink.
- Raw egg whiteUncooked white carries a small salmonella risk, and this drink is never heated. Pasteurized whites from a carton behave nearly as well in the shaker and remove the question.
Fountain manuals like this one taught dispensers to build soft drinks with the vocabulary and technique of the saloon — dashes, shaking, egg white, a bell top glass — and the fizz was one such borrowing, a gin fizz with the gin left out. "Tonique" may point at the quinine preparations that druggists kept alongside the syrups; bitter cinchona extracts such as elixir of calisaya were stocked as tonics and appetizers, and a few dashes gave a temperance drink the medicinal edge that made it feel like something more than sweetened soda. Angostura bitters did similar duty. Since American soda fountains grew out of pharmacies, the same counter could plausibly sell you the drink as refreshment or as a mild restorative.