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Home-made Soda Water
INGREDIENTS. 2¼ pounds of granulated ½ an ounce of ginger exsugar. 1¾ ounces of tartaric acid.
1 pint of water.
Whites of 3 eggs. tract. ¼ a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda for each glass.
Method. - Boil the sugar, water and tartaric acid five minutes. When nearly cold beat into the syrup the whites of the eggs, beaten until foamy, and the flavoring extract. Store in a fruit jar, closely covered. To use, put three tablespoonfuls into a glass half full of cold water, stir in onefourth a teaspoonful of soda, and drink while effervescing. A pint of any kind of fruit juice may displace the water, when a teaspoonful of lemon juice should be added to the contents of each glass before stirring in the soda.
This is a shelf-stored soda-fountain syrup built on raw egg white, and that is the part that cannot be carried over. The notes below explain the chemistry and the terms rather than offering a way to make it.
- Why it fails: uncooked egg in a stored syrupThe whites are beaten into the syrup only after it has cooled, so they are never heated at all, and the jar is then kept as a pantry staple to be drawn on glass by glass. Raw egg white held at room temperature for days is a straightforward Salmonella risk; the sugar concentration and the tartaric acid are not sufficient to make the mixture hostile to bacterial growth. Use a current recipe if you want a homemade soda syrup.
- The eggs are not a flavouringThe beaten whites appear to be there for head and body, giving the drink a clinging foam rather than any taste. Nothing about that effect is beyond a modern cook's reach by other means, so there is no case for keeping them.
- Tartaric acid and bicarbonateThe fizz is a simple acid–base reaction: tartaric acid in the syrup meets bicarbonate of soda in the glass and releases carbon dioxide on the spot. Tartaric acid is still sold for winemaking and confectionery; bicarbonate of soda is ordinary baking soda.
- Ginger extractThe flavouring called for is most likely a concentrated alcoholic tincture of ginger of the kind druggists sold. Commercial ginger extracts today may differ considerably in strength, so the period quantity is not a reliable guide.
- "Fruit jar"A fruit jar is a screw-top or wire-bail preserving jar — a Mason or Lightning jar. The instruction "closely covered" means only that, not sterilised or processed.
- QuantitiesThe ingredient list as printed runs the amounts together and several fractions are unclear, so the sugar, acid and extract weights should not be treated as firm figures.
- YieldThree tablespoons per glass against a syrup made from a pint of water and a little over two pounds of sugar suggests something on the order of two dozen glasses.
By the late nineteenth century the soda fountain was fixed in American commercial life — drugstores drew charged water from pressurised cylinders and flavoured it to order — and domestic cookery books answered with imitations that produced the effervescence chemically in the glass instead. Tartaric acid, sold over the same drugstore counter, seems to have been a common acid for the job; citric acid and cream of tartar are also said to turn up in comparable recipes. The beaten egg white is a home echo of the fountain's egg drinks, the egg phosphates that were counter orders of the period, where raw egg was valued for foam and for the notion that it was nourishing. That such a mixture was expected to sit in a jar in the pantry and be dipped into for weeks is a fair measure of how differently such a household judged the keeping of raw egg.