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Tutti Frutti Phosphate
Mix one half pint each of strawberry, pineapple, cherry, and pear syrups and two tablespoonfuls of acid phosphate. Put four tablespoonfuls into a glass and fill up with soda water. Decorate with a thin piece of lemon peel.
A soda-fountain formula: you build a bulk flavoring base, then draw single drinks from it to order. The proportions only make sense if you read it that way.
- Acid phosphate is a real, buyable ingredientIt is a dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to fountains as a souring agent and still made for the cocktail and soda trade. It gives a dry, mineral tartness with none of the fruit character of lemon juice, which is exactly why it was used here. Citric acid or lemon juice will sour the drink but change it into something else.
- What the syrups wereFountain syrup of the period was roughly two parts sugar to one part water by weight, flavored and often colored, not the thin fruit purée sold as coulis today. Modern soda syrups (Torani, Monin and the like) are the closest match; jarred fruit syrups meant for pancakes are too thick and will not mix into carbonated water cleanly.
- YieldFour half-pints is a quart of syrup base, and each drink takes 4 tablespoons, so the batch makes about sixteen glasses. Scale to a quarter — 2 fl oz of each syrup and about 1 1/2 teaspoons of acid phosphate — if you want four drinks.
- MeasuresA half pint is 8 fluid ounces or 1 cup. Four tablespoonfuls is 2 fluid ounces. The recipe says only to fill the glass up with soda water, so the quantity of soda depends on the glass you use.
- Soda water means charged waterPlain carbonated water from a siphon or seltzer bottle, unsweetened and unsalted. Club soda works; tonic and most flavored sparkling waters do not, as the base is already sweet enough.
- Build it cold and hardChill the syrup base and the soda separately, put the syrup in first, then drive the soda in against it. Fountain men called this drawing a coarse stream — it mixes the drink without a spoon and keeps the gas in it.
- Keeping the baseThe mixed syrup holds several weeks refrigerated in a sealed bottle; the sugar concentration does most of the preserving and the phosphate keeps the pH low.
- The lemon peelCut a wide strip with no pith, twist it over the glass so the oil sprays across the surface, then drop it in. The oil is the point — it lifts what is otherwise a very sweet mixture of four fruits.
Tutti frutti — Italian for "all fruits" — was a nineteenth-century confectioner's term for anything built from a jumble of fruit flavors, applied to ice cream and candy long before it reached the soda fountain. The phosphate itself was a fountain staple from the 1870s onward: acid phosphate had been promoted as a nerve tonic and digestive, and druggists who dispensed it medicinally soon found it made a better-tasting soda than sweet syrup alone. That double life as medicine and refreshment is why drinks like this one turn up in a book of the temperance era, when the American soda fountain was being actively promoted as the respectable alternative to the saloon bar. Acid phosphate fell out of general use as fountains closed through the mid-twentieth century, and returned only recently through bartenders working from old fountain manuals.