Clove Syrup
Add one teaspoonful of quintessence of cloves to a quart of plain syrup. Mix well and bottle.
A one-line soda-fountain formula that assumes you already have two things on hand: a barrel of plain syrup and a pharmacist's shelf of flavouring quintessences. Both need translating.
- Plain syrupFountain and household formularies of the period generally meant a heavy simple syrup, often something like 2 lb granulated sugar dissolved in a pint of water and made up to the quart, rather than the thin 1:1 syrup a bar uses today. Syrup of that strength is dense and pours slowly, and a small measure of it was enough to sweeten a full glass of soda water.
- "Quintessence of cloves"A druggist's term for a concentrated alcoholic essence of the spice, sold alongside quintessences of lemon, ginger and wintergreen. The nearest current equivalent is a food-grade clove flavouring extract or an alcohol tincture of cloves, not the pure essential oil sold for aromatherapy.
- Do not use neat clove essential oilUndiluted clove oil is largely eugenol and is many times stronger than the essence the book means. A teaspoon of it per quart makes a syrup that tastes medicinal and numbs the tongue. If all you have is the oil, treat a few drops as the whole measure.
- Mixing an oil-based flavourClove flavour carries in alcohol, not water, so a neat oil will bead on the surface of cold syrup and stay there. Stir the essence into a little alcohol or a high-proof vanilla-type extract first; warming and agitating will only disperse it temporarily, so shake the bottle each time before pouring.
- Bottle and keepHeavy sugar syrup at this concentration keeps for months in a sealed bottle, but clove aroma fades and the syrup darkens. A dark glass bottle in a cool cupboard holds it better than a clear one on a counter.
- Yield and useMakes 1 quart of flavouring syrup, or roughly 20 to 30 drinks. Fountain practice was commonly around 1 to 1 1/2 oz of syrup topped with 6 to 8 oz of chilled soda water; it is also useful over ice with lemon, or brushed on a ham.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of non-alcoholic drink books published as national Prohibition came into force in 1919 and 1920, when the trade in drinks had to be rebuilt out of syrup, ice and carbonated water. Formulas of this kind read like a pharmacy inventory because the American soda fountain grew up inside the drugstore, where the man mixing a soda had access to the same shelf of essences, tinctures and "quintessences" used in compounding. Clove has long been associated with warming, spiced drinks, and the trade in cloves is among the oldest of the spice trades; here it is doing modest duty as a spiced note for a glass of plain soda.