soda (or "pop")

[calimac]

Scalzi asks, What's your favorite obscure soda flavor? I'm responding here.

A lot of votes for ginger beer. I like ginger beer, and it's not something you see often in the average 7-11, I guess, though it's not hard to find one brand or another.

Perhaps my favorite truly obscure one is a pineapple soda from Hawaii, which I used to be able to get at a local Hawaiian market, but the place closed, so no more.

Another truly obscure one I haven't seen since the place closed where I got it is Inca Cola, which I once tried at a long-gone Peruvian restaurant in San Jose. But, unlike with pineapple soda, I wasn't missing it. It tasted like bubble gum.

But the obscure soda I searched for the longest was Moxie. I first heard of it from Bored of the Rings, whose authors were from Harvard, where Moxie has been heard of. But I didn't know even that much when I first went looking. Many of the characters in Bored of the Rings have food names, and the two young boggies are Pepsi and Moxie. At Mythcon once in the 80s we held a Bored of the Rings food party. We had Fritos and Arrowroot biscuits and Pepsi and I think some Spam and some other things (no Benzedrine, though - come on), and we wanted some Moxie but had never seen it and had no idea how to get any.

It wasn't until years later that I finally found Moxie, at the general store in Plymouth, Vermont, a tiny village now given over to the fact that Calvin Coolidge was born there. On telling this story, I have more than once been informed heatedly that Moxie is objectively vile and evil of taste. I didn't find it at all bad, and though I wasn't rushing back to get some more I have had it again since. The soda I find vile is Dr. Pepper, which lots of people like.

Comments

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

Moxie was a running joke in Mad Magazine for years, which is where I heard of it and where suspect the Lampoon guys picked it up. I find it rather vile, with a metallic taste (but not as bad as Irn Bru.)

It's "Inka Kola". Peruvian place Lin and I went to a couple months ago in San Mateo had it, but since I had had it before and share your opinion I did not bother. (It's not just the taste, it's the strange yellow color. I think it would glow in UV light.)

Places around here that have pretty good selections of obscure soft drinks are the Willows Market just around the corner, and Beverages&More stores. There's also a candy and strange soda store on University Avenue in Palo Alto, but their prices are truly heinous, $4/bottle and up.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There's a place down in Highland Park, L.A., called Galco's, an ex-grocery of considerable size entirely filled with obscure sodas, beers, wines, and (strangely enough) candy bars. I used to stock up there on root beers regularly before my diet pretty much cut such delectables out.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Re hearing of Moxie: I doubt it took Mad Magazine. Moxie is a New England regional product. The Harvard Lampoon is from (surprise!) Harvard. Harvard is in New England. Hence.

[(Anonymous)]

Moxie is certainly obscure now, but I remember that I had heard of it when I first read BotR in the 1960s. It was part of a phrase from the mid-century, along the lines of "He has a lot of moxie", meaning he has guts or gumption or grit. Also I think I remember Mad Magazine referred to it occasionally, most likely for its absurd sound. I don't know which came first, the slang phrase or the soda name. BotR is indeed remarkable for its plumbed depths of American pop culture and literature.

Funny you should mention Dr. Pepper, which is part of a joke in the Foreword to the book ("...enough Fritos and Dr. Pepper to choke a small horse..."). And I can't hear a reference to a soda as "vile" without an unwanted flashback to a comic piece written by (I think) a young John Updike in the early 1950s. In it a nerdy undergraduate character finally confesses that Pepsi, said to be the only thing he drinks, is "really vile". The piece appeared in an anthology of the best of ... the Harvard Lampoon.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'd heard the term moxie; what I hadn't heard of was the sodapop Moxie. Failing to distinguish these is like having a discussion about computers in which you claim to have used Windows before anyone else because you're actually counting from the first time you saw one of these:

[(Anonymous)]

My mistake for not being clearer that I had heard the word, understanding that it was both a phrase and a soda brand, before reading BotR. Mad magazine used both meanings in its humor - the term in the dialogue of comic book characters in various parodies, and the soda in the illustrations. But other pulp-style writers from the 40s and 50s used the term too, evoking what seemed like New York City slang dialogue; and being from New England I did see the soda occasionally as I got older. I actually assumed that the soda was named after the phrase, i.e., the soda has moxie or gives you moxie; but I now wonder, as I said, which use of the word actually came first.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

According to Wikipedia, the term comes from the soda, not the other way around. But if you saw specific references to, and even bottles of, the soda, then in a discussion of knowing about the soda that fact completely overrides the question of knowing the term - though that is interesting for other reasons.

As I noted, I certainly knew the term, but I had had no idea it was also the name of a soda, even though I read MAD Magazine for a while. (It had tamed and became less NYC wise-cracking by the time I got around to it.) Even Bored of the Rings didn't say specifically it was the name of a soda; only the pairing with Pepsi, which I did know about, clued me in.

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

It's quite clear that Mad was referring to the soda, not the phrase, because Mad often used the logo for the soda (google it and you'll see it; note the long slan-like tendrils coming out of the northeast and southwest arms of the "X" in Moxie.) Wally Wood in particular would slap down the Moxie logo in the corner of various panels. (I just looked thru a bunch of my old Mad paperbacks in search of an example, but got distracted by Don Knuth's first publication, "The Potrezebie System of Measurements."

[margdean56.livejournal.com]

Way back in the late 70s / early 80s, when I was living in New Jersey and part of a group that met Friday nights to play Dungeons & Dragons, there were group members who were particularly fond of something called "Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Soda" and would order it at our post-game midnight diner runs. I never actually tasted it, but I gather it was made / flavored with celery, hence the name.

Do you have any notion about what Moxie was flavored with?

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

I believe the most prominent taste in Moxie is gentian, which is also a big part of Angostura Bitters. Angostura is used in many cocktails, like the Manhattan I'm drinking right now, but only a single drop.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I had Inca Kola at a Peruvian restaurant in San Francisco once, and I agree with you about its taste. As it happens, it fails the Scalzi Test, because it's an obscure member of the Coca-Cola family of brands. And while I like vanilla cream soda, I don't like Inca Kola.

[andrewducker]

Shout-out for Irn Bru, the No 1 drink in Scotland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irn-Bru

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Pepsi Diet Caramel Soda, a form of potable plastic that is no longer manufactured.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Ginger beer, but it's not obscure here! :o)