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Alhambra Cream Syrup
Seven ounces cream, 2 ounces peach syrup, 6 ounces orange syrup, 9 ounces vanilla syrup. Use ounce of this mixture when dispensing. Fill the glass half full. Then add a coarse stream and then a fine stream in quick dashes until filled.
This is a fountain man's working formula: a batch of cream-and-syrup base kept cold at the counter, then charged with carbonated water one glass at a time. Two things need translating — the measurements, which are fluid ounces by volume, and the "coarse stream" and "fine stream," which belong to a piece of equipment almost nobody has now.
- The batch, in cupsSeven ounces cream is a scant cup; 2 ounces peach syrup is 1/4 cup; 6 ounces orange syrup is 3/4 cup; 9 ounces vanilla syrup is a generous cup. The finished base comes to 24 fluid ounces, or 3 cups.
- "Use ounce of this mixture"A word has dropped out — read it as one ounce (2 tablespoons) per drink, which is standard fountain practice. Three cups of base therefore makes about 24 sodas.
- Coarse and fine streamA fountain draft arm had two outlets: a wide one that delivered carbonated water fast with little foam, and a fine spray that whipped up head. With a home siphon or a bottle of seltzer, pour the first half firmly down the side of the glass, then finish in short bursts aimed at the center to build foam.
- Glass sizeAssume an 8 to 10 ounce soda glass. "Fill the glass half full" means half full of soda water after the ounce of base goes in, not half full of base.
- The syrupsFountain syrups of the period were heavy — roughly 2 parts sugar to 1 part water, near saturation — not the thin flavoring syrups sold for coffee. Substituting a modern coffee syrup will give a noticeably thinner, less sweet drink. Fruit syrups here are sweetened fruit juice or extract in that heavy sugar base, not fruit preserves.
- Cream"Cream" at a turn-of-the-century fountain was probably closer to today's light cream or half-and-half than to heavy cream, though fat content was not standardised and varied from dairy to dairy. Heavy cream will read as heavy in a carbonated drink.
- Keeping the baseA cream-and-syrup mixture is perishable in a way the plain syrups were not. The sugar helps, but keep it refrigerated and mix only what you will use within a couple of days; the acid in the fruit syrups will eventually curdle it.
- Order of operationsBase in the glass first, then water. Adding syrup to a full glass of seltzer flattens it and leaves the cream streaked at the bottom.
Soda fountain manuals of the 1890s and 1900s ran to hundreds of formulas, and the naming was frankly aspirational: Alhambra, Klondike, Manhattan, Egyptian, whatever sounded like somewhere else. Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra is often credited with making the Moorish palace at Granada a byword for exotic luxury in American popular culture decades earlier, and it is plausible enough that druggists borrowed the word for anything they wanted to sound rich and faintly foreign, though nothing ties this particular formula to Irving here peach, orange, vanilla and cream — there is nothing Spanish about them. What the recipe really documents is the economics of the fountain: the dispenser pre-blended a compound syrup in bulk so that a drink could be pulled in seconds with one pump and one draft, since the fountain was a volume business attached to a pharmacy and speed at the counter was the whole point.