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Ambrosia Syrup
Raspberry Syrup, 1 quart; Vanilla Syrup, 1 quart; Hock Wine, 4 ounces.
A fountain compound rather than a drink: two ready-made syrups blended with a splash of wine, then drawn by the ounce into carbonated water. The proportions are all that matters, so scale them freely.
- Hock wine"Hock" was the standard nineteenth-century English term for white wine from the Rhine, taken from the town of Hochheim. A dry or off-dry German Riesling is the closest modern equivalent; it contributes floral aroma rather than sweetness, since the syrups supply all the sugar.
- What "syrup" means hereFountain syrups of this period were heavy, sugar-dense preparations, often close to saturation, flavored and sometimes lightly acidulated. Commercial pancake or coffee syrups are thinner and sweetened differently; a homemade raspberry syrup cooked to a comparable density will behave much more like the original.
- Proportions, not volumesReduced to ratio: 8 parts raspberry syrup, 8 parts vanilla syrup, 1 part wine. A quart is 32 ounces, so a manageable test batch is 1 cup raspberry, 1 cup vanilla, 2 tablespoons wine.
- Alcohol is negligibleFour ounces of wine in 64 ounces of syrup, then diluted again at the glass, leaves a trace. The wine functions as a flavoring.
- Serving at the glassStandard fountain practice was 1 to 1½ ounces of syrup in a 6- to 8-ounce glass, filled with cold carbonated water and stirred once. Two quarts yields something like forty to sixty drinks.
- Keeping itSugar concentration was the preservative, and fountain syrups were kept in stoppered jars at cellar temperature and turned over quickly. Add the wine to a portion you will use within a week or two and refrigerate the jar; the wine's aroma is the first thing to go once opened.
Ambrosia, the food of the Greek gods, was a favorite name at the American soda fountain for anything meant to sound luxurious, and it attached to several unrelated preparations — the orange-and-coconut dessert of the American South, various punches, and syrups like this one. What marks it as a fountain formula rather than a home recipe is the assumption that the dispenser already has quarts of raspberry and vanilla syrup on hand: the soda clerk's job was compounding, blending stock syrups into proprietary-sounding specialties that a competing shop across the street could not offer. The dash of hock is the period's shorthand for refinement. Rhine wines were widely imported and well regarded in nineteenth-century America, and adding a few ounces to a sweet mixture let a temperance-era fountain gesture at the wine list without crossing into it.