Italian Soda

I feel a little dumb for never having realized the name “Italian” soda was meant to imply having come from Italy. I thought it was just some naming convention, perhaps related to flavors commonly enjoyed by people of Italian ancestry, or some such vaguery. Nobody called it that when I was a kid. It was just called “old-fashioned” then, as there were only a few real soda fountains left.

I suppose this means that people think “French” soda came from France? That used to just be called cream soda in my parents’ day, but maybe there’s an actual French connection I never knew.

Yeah I still remember the first time I ordered an Italian Soda, thinking I was going to get something interesting only to see a few pumps out of a torani bottle, some carbonated water out of a gun and my wallet $5 emptier.

Who cares? I`m not gonna buy your book anyway ^^

This used to be an interesting cocktail blog…

G`vine stuff was kind of interesting thou.

Raymond summed up my one and only Italian soda experience perfectly.

I think part of the problem is that we Americans have largely discontinued the traditional soda. While we moved from handmade sodas to mass industrially produced sodas, Italian/French style sodas stuck with, at least, some of the older handmade methods (or at least less chemicals in the product). So the idea of old-school soda was somewhat abandoned by Americans, leaving it open to others.

As an Italian-American, I think it is important to note that there was a particular meeting point between the ice cream parlor/soda fountain business and Italian immigrants.  It seems that this link is played up to create the appearance of Italians creating the soda. While it can be argued that Italians took on a distinct approach (say in flavor selections like espresso), Italians, on either side of the pond, were not responsible for the original creation.

The idea of an “Italian / French soda” only came about 60 years after Americans introduced the the concept. Even then, Europe didn’t take to the idea of soda until the Great War.

The Italian part really does come from the Toroni syrup company, and it was just some fancy marketing back in the 1920s.

Actually the french version may have some legitimate origins. They also had a soda fountain craze. A chocolate french soda made with cream was called something like “chocolate et crem” (sic) and that may be the origin of the brooklynese mispronunciation of the french drink “chocolate egg cream” that is in effect a “french” soda with milk instead of cream. So the french connection seems fairly accurate. Monin started in this world as a soda syrup manufacturer in France. When the soda fountains died out they sold their syrups for coffee, years before it became popular in the USA. They now have a plant in Clearwater, FL making the syrup for Americans.

While I agree the Italians have little connection with this, I would not immediately discount the french.

Any way, a french soda is just an ice cream soda without the ice cream

-GReg

www.loftypursuits.com
The best soda fountain in the south.

The French actually came later to the game than the British and that was still in the early 1900s, long after America had gone through pretty much every iteration of soda style known.

Now this isn’t to say the Europeans didn’t drink soda, they did, but usually as plain soda / mineral water. The idea of flavouring carbonated water with non-alcoholic syrups was a little alien. Their preferred flavourings were the traditional alcoholic liqueurs.

Thanks for some fascinating information. I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Voorhees, New Jersey, where I asked for an Italian Soda a few minutes ago. The staff as usual looked a bit uncertain, but one of them volunteered that they could make one for me if I would buy a small bottle of unflavored Pelligrino (fancy fizzy-water). As I reached over to pick up a small bottle from the display, she continued, “I can just add the syrup and cream.”

Because my idea of an Italian soda comes from having lived in Berkeley and San Francisco for a few magical years in the 1960s and ‘70s, when cream was not part of the mystique, I quickly said, “No cream!”

The response from behind the counter was, “What’s an Italian soda without cream?”

Now if you could just put out Fix The Pumps as a Kindle book, I can carry it around as a reference in case any more tricky drinks-related questions—or bets—arise in commercial establishments!

So I sat down to research the thing on my iPad, and luckily found your discussion. Now I suddenly know enough to run a little seminar on the topic here and now.

Thanks Ralph. I do have Fix the Pumps as a PDF eBook, which works really nicely on the iPad. If you’ve bought the print copy of Fix the Pumps let me know and I’ll send you the e-copy for free.

Fix the Pumps ebook can be ordered at www.mixthis.ca

It would be nice if you could put out a Kindle edition too. Is that possible—or does publishing an ebook preclude publishing the same ebook in a different format later?

I remember my first Italian soda, it was at an old fashioned soda and ice cream parlor in a tourist trap in a remote part of South Carolina. I was a teenager and it was the best thing I had ever tasted. I had been to Venice Italy, and I saw the word ‘Italian soda’ and was immediately intrigued. I tried it because I wanted to see if it would taste like the blood orange soda I had there. It was not exactly the same, but it had that fresh clean favor that I remembered from Italy. After reading this blog and learning more about American sodas, I now know that sodas of the 1990s are a lot different that what we drank fifty years ago. Maybe that is what I like about ‘Italian sodas’ and the soda I drank in Italy, that classic taste.

If you are talking about “Italian soda” meaning sparking water flavored with sweetened citrus simple syrup it was created by an Italian in Italy. Others just changed the flavor profile. If you are talking about flavored water it was invented by a French company I France in the 1800’s. No carbonation. So I don’t know wha
t drink you are talking about when you say American. US is very talented at adding sugar to everything so maybe you mean sugar water.

Hello Hadi,

Thanks for the comment, but your statements aren’t true. I’ve done extensive research on this topic for my book Fix the Pumps and Americans did in-fact create what we know as soda, including lemon soda.

If you have real proof of French or Italian soda being invented earlier I’d love to see it. I’m always open to new research, but it’s not good enough to just say it happened, you need to prove it.

Plus, I’m Canadian, so I’m not just trying to claim the soda title.

So is it more correct for me to call it an Old-Fashioned Soda? I’m researching the “Italian Soda” because I work at an actual Italian Caffe in San Francisco, and considering adding this to the menu. But I didn’t know it wasn’t actually Italian…

SD, yes it would be more accurate to call it an “old fashioned soda”.