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World's Fair Flip
Three-fourths glass shaved ice, ½ ounce lemon juice, 1½ ounces checkerberry syrup, 3 dashes angostura bitters. Shake and fill glass with ginger ale. Straws.
A shaken fountain drink built in a tall soda glass. The whole thing hinges on shaking the base cold and adding the ginger ale afterward, so the carbonation survives.
- Glass sizeThe recipe does not specify the glass. Filling three-fourths with shaved ice leaves the remaining quarter for the syrup, juice and ginger ale, which is why the measures are small.
- Shaved iceNot cubes. Shaved or finely crushed ice chills fast and dilutes the syrup slightly, which the recipe counts on. Cubes will leave the drink sharp and oversweet.
- Checkerberry syrupCheckerberry is the eastern teaberry, Gaultheria procumbens, and the syrup tasted of wintergreen. Bottled teaberry or wintergreen soda syrup is the closest current match. Do not substitute oil of wintergreen or a wintergreen essential oil, which is concentrated methyl salicylate and not a food ingredient at that strength.
- Angostura in a sodaThree dashes is not a mistake. Aromatic bitters were common fountain stock, used for their bitter aromatic edge rather than their alcohol, which is negligible at that volume.
- Shake, then topShake only the ice, lemon juice, syrup and bitters. Pour into the glass and add the ginger ale last, or the carbonation is lost in the shaker.
- Lemon juiceHalf an ounce is a tablespoon. Fresh juice, not bottled, since there is nothing else in the glass to hide it.
- "Flip"At the fountain a flip often meant a drink with a whole egg shaken in. This one has none, so the name may refer to the shake rather than the composition.
- YieldOne tall glass. The recipe specifies straws, which suits a glass packed with shaved ice.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were full of drinks named for expositions, and a "World's Fair" title on a formula was less a claim of origin than a claim of currency, either the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 or the St. Louis fair of 1904 being the usual reference points depending on the book's date. The flavoring here is thoroughly American: checkerberry, or teaberry, is a low woodland creeper native to the eastern states, and its wintergreen note ran through nineteenth-century candy, chewing gum and soda long before it became a regional soda flavor associated with Pennsylvania. The presence of Angostura bitters in a non-alcoholic drink is a reminder that the dispenser's counter and the bar counter shared a great deal of stock.