The counter, and the person behind it
A soda fountain sat inside an American pharmacy for the better part of a century, from the 1880s on. Carbonated water started out sold as a health drink, plain and nearly tasteless, and a fruit syrup was added to make it worth drinking. Within a generation the syrup was the reason anyone came in: one tap of carbonated water, a rail of syrups beside it, and a person behind the counter who combined them to order.
The formal job title was soda clerk. Soda jerk was the nickname, after the back and forth pull on the fountain handle that drew the water. The work peaked from the 1910s into the 1940s and lasted, in a smaller way, into the late 1950s, before vending machines and a bottled drink that tasted the same in every town took the counter's one job away from it. The full account, the counter, the bottle, and what has come back since, is on The Soda Jerk.
What people still ask for
Some of what a soda jerk built is still asked for by name. An egg cream is milk, soda water and a chocolate or vanilla syrup, stirred to a white head, with neither egg nor cream in it. It is a New York drink, sold out of candy shops from the 1890s, and nobody has settled why it is called that: three stories compete and none is proved. A phosphate was a fruit syrup and a dash of acid phosphate under soda water, sharp rather than sweet, and lemon was the best seller of it by 1900. An ice cream soda, syrup and soda water with a scoop of vanilla on top, is credited to a Philadelphia fountain in 1874, whose owner said later he built it to outdo a rival, not because he had run out of ice, which is the version usually told. A root beer float is the same scoop on root beer instead. A cherry lime rickey is lime juice and cherry syrup under soda water over ice, and a working fountain in New York still lists one. A cherry cola and a vanilla cola were the plainest orders of all: the day's soda with one syrup pumped over it, which is the whole idea of this book in a glass.
The same idea here, and in a dirty soda
New Zealand's own counter was the milk bar rather than a pharmacy: somewhere a drink was still built rather than opened, and it closed for the same reason the American counter did, once a bottled drink turned up that was cheaper and identical everywhere. New Zealand has its own flavoured soda too: Lemon and Paeroa was first bottled commercially in 1909, from a spring at Paeroa whose water had been analysed five years earlier and found unusually high in magnesium bicarbonate, with lemon juice stirred through it.
The dirty soda is the same idea, back by a different route. It began in Utah around 2010 and spread from phone to phone rather than counter to counter: a soda, jerked with a flavoured syrup, finished with a cream on top. It exists for the same reason the fountain once did: plenty of people still want a third thing to order that is not a bar or a cafe, and a queue at a soda counter fills that gap much the way a pharmacy counter did during Prohibition, ninety years earlier. What a dirty soda is has the short version with six to start from; the method is in How to make a dirty soda, and the cream or foam on top has its own guide, How to make dirty soda creams and foams.
What the drop changes
A fountain's pump did two jobs at once. It delivered the flavour and the sugar that syrup was already carrying, welded together, so the sweetness of a fountain drink was decided the moment the syrup was made, before anyone had tasted anything. Most of what is sold as a dirty soda today still works that way: a bought syrup and a bought creamer, both already sweetened, deciding two things for you before a glass is poured.
A drop does one of those jobs and leaves the other to you. There is no sweetener in the bottle at all, so it changes what a drink tastes of without touching how sweet it is, and the sugar becomes its own decision, made when the syrup is built or the base is chosen. How to use the drops covers what a drop actually does, and How to make a flavoured syrup covers the rest of that decision.
Every recipe in the book is built from the same short list of jobs, however different two glasses look. The base is what you pour: hot or cold, fizzy or still, with dairy or without. The sweetener rides on it, chosen separately because the drop brings none. The creamer finishes it, laid on top rather than stirred through, and that is the dirty half. The garnish sits beside the glass, a lolly picked to go with what is in it. And the drop, the one part that never moves, goes in on every path, while the drink is still being built.
What's ahead
This book is planned across thirteen chapters, in this order. Only the first is open. The rest fill in as drinks are proven in Basedrop's own test kitchen, so a chapter that is not in the contents yet is waiting on that proof, not forgotten.
- Jerk Basics. Everything the rest of the book assumes you can already make: the drop, the syrups, the creams and the foams, with a guide in front of each, then making a dirty soda, and what all of it looks like from behind a bar.
- Dirty Sodas. The drink the book is named for: a soda jerked with syrup, finished with a flavoured cream on top.
- The Fountain. Sodas built the plain way, a base and a syrup, nothing on top.
- The Tea Room. Tea, hot or over ice, where the syrup carries the sweetness as well as the flavour.
- The Coffee Bar. Coffee with a syrup stirred through it, which is older than the espresso machine.
- The Spindle. Shakes and malts, shaken by hand again, the way they were made before the spindle mixer arrived in 1911.
- The Creamery. Cream, served as the drink itself, not spooned onto one.
- The Juice Press. Juice from real fruit rather than a long-life bottle. The fruit already brings its own acid, so the syrup here is the plain build more often than not.
- The Icebox. Still and sparkling water, carrying nothing in the glass but the syrup.
- The Shaker. Protein shakes, flavoured to cover the tub rather than repeat it.
- The Snug. The weight of a nightcap, without the alcohol.
- The Deck. Long, bright drinks for outside, built to be picked up again after they have sat a while.
- After Hours. Cocktails, and the drinks that sit beside them. Adults only, and signed in.
How to use this book
Open a chapter from the list and the recipe sits alongside it, the way a menu and a glass would sit together on a real counter. Read the method beside the ingredient list rather than one after the other, since a build usually depends on the order things go in as much as what goes in. Behind the bar shows what one bottle turns into behind a bar in four moves: a glass, a syrup, a charged cream and a long drink.
Whatever this book does not hold yet, and there is still a lot it does not hold yet, the Basedrop Builder will work it out anyway. It runs on the same idea as the book but answers on the spot: pick what you are pouring, a flavour drop, and what sits on top, and it draws the glass, counts the drops for whatever size glass you are using, and writes out the method to match. Once the book has caught up with a build, it says so and links the recipe.