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Peach Pop
Cook enough peaches to make two cups of juice and drain through a jelly bag. Make a syrup of the juice with one cup of sugar or honey. Add one ounce of tartaric acid. Stir well and bottle. To serve, add two tablespoonfuls of syrup to three fourths of a glass of water. Stir in a pinch of bicarbonate of soda and drink while foaming. Apricot Pop may be made the same way.
A homemade soda syrup from the era before commercial bottling, built on the same acid-plus-alkali reaction that gives seltzer its fizz. The whole point is to mix and drink immediately.
- The hinge: drink it foamingThe bubbles come from tartaric acid in the syrup meeting bicarbonate of soda in the glass, which releases carbon dioxide on contact. There is no carbonation held in reserve, so the drink is at its best within seconds of stirring and flat within a minute or two.
- Tartaric acidSold as a powder for baking and winemaking, and still easy to find. One ounce is roughly two tablespoons by volume; weigh it if you can, since powders vary in packing. It is a food acid, not a hazard, but the syrup will taste aggressively sour on its own, which is intentional.
- A pinch of bicarbonateRead this as about an eighth of a teaspoon. More will not make more fizz worth having and will leave a soapy, salty edge from the sodium tartrate that forms.
- Jelly bagA doubled square of damp cheesecloth in a sieve does the same job. Let it drip rather than squeezing, or the juice will be cloudy and the syrup murky.
- Getting two cups of juiceFigure roughly three pounds of ripe peaches, stoned, chopped and simmered with a splash of water until collapsed. Peel and all can go in; the bag catches the solids.
- Making the syrupDissolve the sugar or honey in the warm juice and bring it just to a simmer to clarify, then cool before stirring in the acid. Adding acid to hot syrup drives off aroma and can invert the sugar further than you want.
- Bottling and keepingThe original gives no storage directions. Sugar and acid together are a decent preservative, but this is not a canned product: keep it in the refrigerator in a clean bottle and use it within a few weeks. Cap loosely at first and check for signs of fermentation, which is the usual failure with fruit syrups.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups of syrup, or roughly twenty glasses at two tablespoons each.
This comes from a compilation of non-alcoholic drinks of the Prohibition period; "water wagon" is the old temperance phrase for going dry. "Pop" had meant a fizzy drink since the early nineteenth century, generally traced to the sound of a cork leaving a bottle, and home versions like this one imitated the soda fountain without any pressurised equipment: the cook supplied the acid, the drinker supplied the alkali, and the glass did the rest. The pairing of tartaric acid and bicarbonate of soda was already familiar from baking powders and from effervescent seltzer powders sold by druggists, which is why the technique needed no explanation to readers of the period. Note the alternative of honey for sugar.