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Cherry Blossom
Mix one pint of fresh cherry juice with two quarts of plain syrup, add one teaspoonful of essence of bitter almonds and one teaspoonful of citric acid. Put four tablespoonfuls of the syrup into a glass and fill up with soda water. Add a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. Put a cherry in each glass.
This is a soda-fountain syrup formula from the era when a druggist compounded his own flavourings, and one of its four ingredients is the reason it cannot be reproduced today.
- Essence of bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which breaks down on contact with water and enzyme into benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. The unrectified essence sold in period pharmacies carried prussic acid as a matter of course, and a teaspoonful dosed into a syrup meant to be spooned out by the tablespoon is not a quantity anyone can vouch for. Use a current recipe if you want a cherry soda syrup.
- Why the dose cannot be recalculatedThe strength of nineteenth-century bitter almond essences varied enormously between makers, and the recipe gives no indication of whether a rectified (cyanide-reduced) or crude preparation is meant. There is no honest way to convert a teaspoonful of an unspecified preparation into a modern measure.
- Plain syrupFountain plain syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, commonly somewhere near two pounds of sugar to a pint of water, though formulas varied from book to book. Two quarts of it is a large batch.
- Citric acidStill sold as a powder in the baking or canning aisle. In fountain work it sharpened the flat sweetness of the syrup; it would also have lowered the acidity of the syrup in an open jar.
- Soda waterFountain soda was delivered under pressure, and the stream was used to mix the syrup into the glass. The instruction to "fill up" assumes that jet of gas is doing the stirring.
- YieldFour tablespoonfuls per glass against five pints of finished syrup works out to about forty servings.
Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the run of dispensers' manuals printed around the Prohibition years, when soda fountains were being pitched to druggists and saloonkeepers alike as the coming trade. The bitter-almond note it depends on is the same one that gives marzipan, amaretto and maraschino their character, and fountain men used it to make ordinary cherry juice taste like a richer, darker cherry than it was. That habit long outlived the drink: benzaldehyde, now made synthetically and without the cyanide that accompanied it in the pressed oil, is still the reason artificial cherry flavour tastes almost nothing like fresh fruit.