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Virginia Julep
One-fourth ounce creme de menthe syrup, ½ ounce lemon syrup, 3 dashes port wine, 2 maraschino cherries. Serve in 8-ounce mineral. Add sprig fresh mint.
A fountain drink written in the shorthand of a soda dispenser's manual: the syrups go in the glass, the carbonated water is assumed. Read it as a build, not a mixed drink.
- The missing ingredientNothing in the text says to fill the glass, because at a fountain that went without saying. Draw the glass full with cold carbonated water after the syrups, using coarse stream at first and fine stream to finish so the foam does not run over.
- The measuresA quarter ounce is 1½ teaspoons, or half a tablespoon. Half an ounce is one tablespoon. Three dashes from a dash-stoppered bottle amount to only a fraction of a teaspoon in total.
- "8-ounce mineral"A mineral glass: tall, straight-sided, thin-walled, made for charged water. Any 8-ounce highball or Collins glass serves. Chill it, since there is no ice in the formula and the drink relies on cold water for its bite.
- Creme de menthe syrupAt the fountain this was a non-alcoholic green mint syrup, not the liqueur of the same name. Substitute a mint syrup, or the liqueur only if you accept that you have changed the drink into an alcoholic one.
- Lemon syrupPeriod lemon syrup was sharper and generally sweeter than modern lemonade concentrate: essentially a lemon simple syrup with citric acid. A sugar syrup with fresh juice and a pinch of citric acid comes close, though fountain syrups were often heavier than equal parts sugar and water.
- The portThree dashes is a flavour accent, a fraction of a teaspoon, and it may also tint the green with a little red. A ruby port would show more colour than a tawny.
- The mintSlap the sprig once between the palms before it goes in. Bruising it releases the oil; muddling it into the syrup turns the drink grassy and cloudy.
- YieldOne 8-ounce glass. Fountain formulas are written per serving and scale badly, since the syrup-to-water ratio depends on the glass being filled to the same point every time.
The word julep travelled a long way before it reached a drugstore counter: Persian gulab, rose water, became Latin julapium, a sweet syrup used to carry medicine, and in English it came, gradually and largely in America, to suggest a sweetened spirituous drink taken as a restorative. The American mint julep — spirits, sugar, mint, ice — grew out of that, and Virginia and Kentucky have argued over its parentage for as long as anyone has written it down. What appears here is the soda fountain's answer to it, from the years when the fountain competed directly with the bar for the same customers and the same vocabulary: the mint and the ceremony are kept, the whiskey is gone, and three dashes of port stand in for the whole idea of a wine drink. Fountain manuals of the period are full of these borrowings, and it is tempting to read the naming as deliberate — to imagine that a customer ordering a Virginia Julep at a marble counter knew exactly what he was not getting.