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White Lion
One ounce raspberry syrup, 2 or 3 dashes of lemon juice, dash of Jamaica rum. Use mineral glass and serve still.
A fountain drink of three parts: sweet syrup, sour juice, and a whisper of spirit, built in the glass and topped with plain water rather than soda. Almost everything hinges on knowing what the old fountain terms mean.
- "Serve still"Still means no carbonation: the glass is filled with plain cold water from the fountain's still-water draft, not the charged draft. If you carbonate it you have made a different drink entirely.
- Mineral glassA fountain glass used for mineral (plain or charged) water, generally on the larger side, something like 8 ounces or more. One ounce of syrup in that volume gives a lightly sweet, cordial-strength drink.
- A dashFountain dashes came from a stoppered dash bottle and were small and inexact, on the order of an eighth of a teaspoon. Two or three dashes of lemon is therefore roughly a quarter to three-eighths of a teaspoon, enough to cut the syrup without turning it into lemonade.
- Raspberry syrupThe fountain article was a heavy sugar syrup, far denser and sweeter than the thin flavoured water sold as snow-cone syrup. A good raspberry cordial or a homemade syrup of crushed berries and sugar is closer to the original.
- Jamaica rumThe dark, pungent pot-still style, used here for its aroma rather than its strength; a single dash is well under a teaspoon.
- IceThe recipe specifies none. Use thoroughly chilled water, or build over ice, and stir once; the syrup is dense and will otherwise sit at the bottom.
- YieldOne glass. Scaling up for a pitcher works, but add the lemon and rum last and taste, since both dominate quickly.
Soda fountain dispensers borrowed their drink names freely from taverns, hotels, playing cards and popular songs, and White Lion is a common English inn sign, heraldic in origin, which is the likeliest source rather than any particular bar or bartender. What the formula shows is how close the American fountain sat to the saloon before Prohibition: a dash of Jamaica rum in a raspberry cordial is a mixed drink in everything but volume, and fountain manuals of the period carried dozens like it alongside the ice cream sodas. Raspberry syrup itself was the workhorse of the trade, often traced to the vinegar shrubs and raspberry cordials of the nineteenth-century household.