noshing

Edamame Alia and Aria olive oil Vietnam Restaurant shakes Fastachi dried cantaloupe

I’ve been reflecting lately on the difference between the soft drink and soda pop. If you’ve ever heard George Carlin’s brilliant routine comparing football and baseball, you’ll know what I mean. A soft drink is what you spike with the rum you sneaked into the stadium while the Patriots were busy penetrating the defense; a soda pop is for cheering on the Sox as they just try to get the runs home. Now that we’ve become a nation of soft-drinkers, with only the occasional bottle of birch beer to jolt our collective memory, we can thank goodness for the French (really!) and their gorgeous Lemonades of Specialty ($4.95 per bottle), now available at Formaggio Kitchen.

An aura of effervescence surrounds these stoppered glass bottles and their candy-colored contents, all in the quaintest of flavors. Try the bright pink rose — it’s like drinking perfume, but in a good way. The violet smells like the bath cubes I once ate as a kid — by accident, of course — and tastes of delicacy itself. And the sparkling red poppy lemonade would have been just the thing to mix with your tincture of laudanum when you had the vapors back in the old days — it really perks up with a nip of vodka. And then there’s pistachio: what it lacks in decorum it makes up for in cheer, with its uncanny resemblance (in both hue and tang) to lime Jell-O. Also available in orange, lemon, tangerine, peach-apricot, cherry, and bilberry, this pop’s pure liquid charm.