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American Concentrated Fruit Syrups
Delicious True Fruit Flavors.
Almond, Cream of Apricot Grape, Catawba Grape Fruit Peach Orange, Maltese Banana Banana, Red Blackberry Cherry, Red Cherry, Wild Nectar Lemon Lime Orangeade Lemonade Pineapple Plum Black Raspberry Red Raspberry Sherbet Currant.
Grape Orange, Blood Strawberry Mix 1 quart of any of above concentrated fruit syrups with 3 to 5 quarts of simple syrup. Add 1 ounce of fruit acid and ½ ounce of soda foam if desired; also a few drops of ruby color in the case of red fruit. Mix well. These syrups are so strong that they will mix 1 part to 6 of syrup make good flavor, but as we believe the best soda means the best trade, we advise the proportions of 1 to 3.
This is a soda fountain dispensing formula rather than a domestic recipe: it tells the operator how to let down a purchased concentrate into the syrup that goes under the carbonated water. Most of it translates directly if you know what the trade terms meant.
- Simple syrup, fountain strengthFountain simple syrup of this period was heavy — roughly 2 parts granulated sugar to 1 part water by weight, near saturation, not the thin 1:1 syrup of a modern bar. Using a lighter syrup will give a thin, weakly sweet finished drink and will spoil faster.
- The ratio is the whole recipeOne quart of concentrate to three quarts of simple syrup gives four quarts of dispensing syrup. At the usual pour of about 1 to 1.5 fluid ounces per glass, that is roughly 85 to 128 drinks.
- Fruit acid"Fruit acid" in the trade generally meant a prepared solution of citric or tartaric acid in water rather than dry crystals, though usage was not consistent. If you are working from powder, dissolve it and add to taste, judging by the finished drink rather than the syrup.
- Soda foamA foaming agent, in the trade almost always an extract of quillaia (soap bark) or a similar saponin preparation, sold to give head and cling. It is optional here and does nothing for flavor. Quillaia extract is still permitted as a beverage foaming agent in the US and EU, but the old unlabelled fountain foams are not something to substitute blindly.
- Ruby colorPeriod fountain colors were coal-tar dyes of varying quality, sold by the ounce. If you want the tint, use a modern certified food color; the colour is presumably there because a red syrup diluted three or four times reads pink rather than red.
- The named flavorsSeveral are period varietals rather than generic fruit. Catawba is a native American grape with a musky, foxy character; the Maltese orange is itself a blood-orange variety, so those two entries overlap even though the list keeps them apart; "Cherry, Wild" is the sharper wild black cherry note, and "Nectar" was a proprietary blend flavor rather than a fruit, its composition varying from house to house.
- SherbetIn a soda fountain list, "Sherbet" is a syrup for a foamy acid drink served with soda water, not a frozen dessert.
- StorageThe finished dispensing syrup keeps on the strength of its sugar. Bottle it full, cap it, and refrigerate; the diluted syrup is far more perishable than the concentrate and will grow mold at the neck if it sits half-empty and warm.
Concentrated fruit syrups were the backbone of the American soda fountain from the 1880s onward, because they let a druggist stock a shelf of flavors in quart bottles instead of putting up fruit himself. The insistence on "true fruit" in the heading was a commercial argument as much as a culinary one: much fountain flavoring of the era was compounded from esters and had no fruit in it, and after the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 the distinction between a fruit syrup and an artificially flavored one carried legal weight in labelling. The closing line — that the syrup will stretch one to six but that the best soda means the best trade — is the standard note struck throughout fountain manuals of the period, which were written for proprietors competing on the reputation of their glass rather than on price.