Soda Beer
Two pounds white sugar, whites of two eggs, two ounces tartaric acid, two table-spoons flour, two quarts water and juice of one lemon; boil two or three minutes, and flavor to taste. When wanted for use, take a half tea-spoon soda, dissolve in half a glass of water, pour into it about two table-spoons of the acid, and it will foam to the top of the glass. - Mrs. Geo. W. Sampson.
This is not a beer at all but a keeping syrup for a home soda fountain: an acid concentrate that is made to fizz in the glass by a pinch of bicarbonate. A few of the quantities read oddly to modern eyes.
- What you are actually makingThe boiled mixture is the stock syrup, kept in a bottle; the "two table-spoons of the acid" in the second half means two tablespoons of that syrup. Each glass is mixed to order and drunk while it is still foaming.
- Tartaric acidTwo ounces is weight, roughly 57 g or about 1/4 cup of the powder. It is still sold for baking and winemaking; buy food grade, not the technical grade offered for cleaning. Citric acid behaves similarly but tastes rounder and less sharp.
- Soda"Soda" here is bicarbonate of soda, plain baking soda, not baking powder and not washing soda. Half a teaspoon in half a glass of water is the whole gas supply, so it must be fresh.
- The egg whites and flourBoth are foam stabilisers, holding the head up rather than letting it collapse the instant the gas escapes. Whisk the whites into the cold water with the flour before heating; some coagulation during boiling is likely in any case, so straining through a sieve afterwards does no harm.
- Boiling timeTwo or three minutes at a full boil is all the recipe wants; longer will not thicken it usefully and will drive off the lemon. The syrup stays thin and pourable.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative beyond sugar and acid, and the egg makes it more perishable than a plain sugar syrup would be. The recipe gives no keeping time; bottle it, refrigerate, and use within a week or two.
- Flavouring"Flavor to taste" here would most likely have meant a bottled extract, of the sort then common: lemon, vanilla, wintergreen, sarsaparilla or ginger. Add it off the heat so it does not boil away.
- YieldTwo quarts of syrup at two tablespoons a glass gives something over sixty drinks, which suits a household of children on a hot afternoon better than a couple. Halve or quarter it freely.
Before bottled soft drinks were cheap and everywhere, effervescence was something you produced at the table by putting an acid and an alkali together in the same glass. Powders of that kind, sold as "seidlitz" and "soda powders", were a druggist's staple, and cookbooks like Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1877) simply reproduced the chemistry at home, cheaply, out of the pantry. Calling it "beer" follows the older, looser sense of the word for any sweetened, flavoured, fizzy drink -- root beer, ginger beer, spruce beer -- most of which had little or no alcohol and were often championed for exactly that reason during the temperance decades. The recipe's attribution to Mrs. Geo. W. Sampson is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named women and reads as a record of what a particular circle of households actually kept on hand.