The Soda Fountain

The American soda fountain grew out of the nineteenth-century trade in carbonated mineral water and the apothecary's counter, where druggists dispensed fizzing waters as a remedy before they sold them as a pleasure. By the later nineteenth century the fountain had become a fixture of the drugstore and the confectioner's shop in towns and cities across the country, and it remained so well into the twentieth century.

The fountain was a piece of equipment before it was a place. Carbonated water, drawn from a tap at the counter, was combined with a flavoured syrup by a man or woman behind the marble, and the skill lay in the proportion: syrup first, then the water, then a stir that left the drink lively without letting it foam over the glass. The soda jerk, as the counter hand came to be called, was judged on that economy of motion and on a memory for the regular customer's order. From the plain flavoured soda the repertory widened by steps. Ice cream added to syrup and carbonated water made the ice cream soda, and the same ice cream with milk and syrup, beaten or blended, made the milk shake and the malted. The sundae, the banana split and the phosphate belong to the same counter and the same hand. Each was assembled to order in a tall glass, a dish or a paper cup, with a long spoon and a straw, and each depended on cold held steadily from the first scoop to the last. The fountain was also a social institution. It stood at the corner of the drugstore, where a customer might sit at the counter for a few cents, and it gave young people a respectable meeting place at a time when other public rooms were closed to them. The counter served light food as well, sandwiches, soups and simple lunches, which tied it to the lunch counter and the diner, though its identity always rested on the cold and the sweet. The decline of the fountain followed changes in the trade around it: bottled soft drinks, packaged ice cream and the shifting economics of the drugstore left fewer counters in service. What survives, in revived counters and in the vocabulary of the sundae and the malted, preserves a method whose merit was simple. Good syrup, cold water, firm ice cream and a practised hand made a drink that could not be improved by anything but restraint.

The fountain's flavours were few and exact: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, cherry and lemon-lime, set against the sharpness of carbonation and the cold of the ice cream. A phosphate gave a clean acidity, a malted a toasted, grainy depth, and the dish succeeded when sweetness stayed in balance with cold and fizz.