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Sugar (Quart Apollinaris cup orange)
1 quart Apollinaris 1/3 cup orange juice 12 strawberries Mint leaves Cucumber rind Mix ingredients, except Apollinaris, using enough sugar to sweeten to taste. Stand on ice to chill, and add chilled Apollinaris just before serving.
A summer cup of the temperance sort: fruit and herbs steeped briefly in juice, then lengthened with sparkling water at the last moment. The list as printed is telegraphic, and the sugar is left to taste.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated mineral water from the Ahr valley in Germany, widely imported and sold in the United States around 1900. Any dry, strongly carbonated mineral water stands in for it; avoid seltzers with added flavouring or sweetener.
- QuantitiesOne quart of water to a third of a cup of orange juice makes a very lightly fruited drink. Sugar is unmeasured on purpose — start with two teaspoons dissolved in the juice and taste before you add more.
- Cucumber rindPeel it in wide strips with a vegetable peeler and use the green only, no white pith, which turns bitter. Two or three strips are enough for a quart; pull them out before serving so the flavour does not go vegetal.
- MintBruise the leaves lightly between your fingers rather than chopping them. Chopped mint leaves specks in suspension that cloud the drink; whole bruised leaves give the scent without the murk.
- StrawberriesTwelve berries, hulled and halved or sliced, will perfume the juice as they sit. Fully ripe fruit gives more flavour and more sugar, so sweeten after the maceration, not before.
- "Stand on ice"In the original this means setting the bowl or pitcher in the icebox or in a bed of cracked ice — not adding ice to the liquid. An hour in the refrigerator does the same work without dilution.
- The hingeThe mineral water goes in at the table and nowhere earlier. Every minute it spends stirred into the fruit costs carbonation, and a flat fruit cup is a thin drink.
- YieldAbout four and a half cups, or four to six small glasses. Serve in tall glasses over a single large piece of ice, with a strawberry and a mint sprig left in each.
Fannie Farmer's beverage chapter is full of these "cups" — a bottle of imported mineral water — and they reflect a very specific moment in American entertaining, when temperance sentiment was strong in the middle-class households the Boston Cooking School trained cooks for, but the ritual of a claret cup or a champagne cup at a summer party was still wanted. Substituting Apollinaris for wine let a hostess keep the form and drop the alcohol. Apollinaris was bottled at a spring in the German Ahr valley and advertised widely from the 1870s onward as the "Queen of Table Waters"; its name in a recipe was a small piece of status, the way a brand of tonic might be specified now. The cucumber rind is often taken as an older English touch, resembling the wine cups of the mid-nineteenth century, in which a curl of cucumber peel was valued for its cool, green smell.