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Wild Strawberry Cordial
One ounce wild strawberry syrup, juice of 1 lemon. Stir while adding hot soda. Add several preserved strawberries.
A hot-soda-counter drink, built in the glass or mug rather than mixed in advance. It takes about a minute, and the only real variable is the syrup.
- The ounce is a fluid ounceFountain syrups were pumped in one-ounce shots, so read this as 2 tablespoons of syrup. One lemon yields roughly 1 to 1.5 fl oz of juice, which makes the drink noticeably tart against a single ounce of syrup; taste before serving and add a second half-ounce of syrup if it bites.
- "Hot soda" is not fizzyWinter fountains ran a hot-water draft alongside the cold carbonated one. Even where genuinely carbonated water was heated, it lost its gas almost at once. Very hot water, around 180F, is the correct modern stand-in; carbonated water heated on the stove will foam over and go flat anyway.
- Stir while pouring, and whyThe instruction is the hinge of the recipe. Lemon juice and a heavy sugar syrup will sit in a layer at the bottom of a mug of hot water unless they are agitated as the water goes in, and a hot drink cannot be shaken to fix it afterwards.
- Wild strawberry syrupMade from Fragaria virginiana or vesca, smaller and more perfumed than the cultivated berry. It is a specialty item now, sold as sirop de fraise des bois; a good cultivated-strawberry syrup works, though it tastes rounder and less musky. Avoid anything labelled strawberry that lists no fruit.
- Preserved strawberriesWhole berries put up in heavy syrup, not jam. They are dropped in at the end as a garnish and eaten with a spoon. Drain them well, or the extra syrup will oversweeten the mug.
- Vessel and yieldOne serving. Hot fountain drinks went into a handled mug or a glass set in a metal holder; a thin tumbler with no holder is a poor idea at this temperature.
Hot soda was the fountain trade's answer to the slow months. Around the turn of the twentieth century many American druggists advertised hot soda counters through the colder part of the year, serving beef tea, hot clam bouillon, hot chocolate, and a range of fruit "cordials" like this one, all drawn from the same syrup pumps that served ice cream sodas in July. "Cordial" here carries no alcohol: at the fountain it simply meant a sweetened, flavored, restorative drink, a usage inherited from the medicinal cordials the druggist also sold over the same counter. Wild strawberry in particular had a long apothecary association, its leaf and root having been used in tonic preparations, which made it an easy sell on a pharmacy's winter menu even when the syrup in the bottle was doing nothing more than tasting good.