This was a very exciting drink for me, less for the particular flavors and mix itself, and more for the interesting technique it allowed me to learn. In short, if you put a little baking soda into an acidic drink, it makes it bubbly! Which totally makes sense, but it’s not something I had ever thought about before. Who needs a SodaStream when you have baking soda? (But note that I still do have one.)

The Soda Nectar is also notable for being non-alcoholic. Thomas actually has a number of non-alcoholic concoctions in his book — a lot of various lemonades, among other things — and I’m excited to go through those as well. Especially the orgeat lemonade, but that’s another entry.

One note about this one: he uses “carbonate of soda” which is technically different from baking soda (Na2CO3 versus NaHCO3) but may not actually be edible? Obviously it’s basically edible (you can actually make it just by heating up baking soda for a while) but there were enough conflicting sources online that I chose not to use it. Also it’s hard to find. “Washing soda” is the other name for it.

In a surprisingly relevant piece of soda news, Pepsi is going to be opening a restaurant in New York Meat Packing District this spring called the “Kola House,” with cuisine “inspired by the exploration of the kola nut.” Which actually sounds kind of cool, as long as they’re open to serving Coke instead of Pepsi.

228. Soda Nectar

(Use large tumbler.)

• Juice of 1 lemon.
• ¾ tumblerful of water.
• Powdered white sugar to taste. [I probably used about 3 tablespoons, which shows you how sweet sodas are.]
• ½ teaspoon of carbonate of soda. [Again, I used baking soda here.]
• Strain the juice of the lemon, and add it to the water, with sufficient white sugar to sweeten the whole nicely. When well mixed, put in the soda, stir well, and drink while the mixture is in an effervescing state.

Tasting Notes:

BN: As I mentioned before, the drink itself was not super fascinating; it’s basically just bubbly lemonade. However, I just can’t get over the baking soda thing. It kept it bubbly for a while, too — it wasn’t like a grade-school volcano — and I definitely want to try it again in other circumstances!

PiC: It was cool! It was basically like a lemon soda — it’s a cool way of doing that and it didn’t taste like baking soda which was good. Let’s try it with other flavors! (And can we do it with non-acidic flavoring? SCIENCE!)