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American Crushed Fruit
Mix one part of fruit with two parts heavy, simple syrup, and dispense from bowl on counter. Use a ladle to serve the fruit. These fruits are finely crushed. Put up in full measure half-gallon jars. Apricot Blackberry Cherry Green Gage Orange Peach Pineapple Raspberry Strawberry
This is a fountain base rather than a finished drink: sweetened crushed fruit held ready to ladle into sodas, sundaes and phosphates. The proportions are the whole recipe, so get the syrup right first.
- Heavy simple syrupIn fountain usage "heavy" generally means a near-saturated syrup, commonly around 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight, heated only until clear. A thinner 1:1 syrup is likely to give a watery crush that separates in the bowl.
- One part fruit to two parts syrupThe recipe does not say whether the parts are by weight or volume; volume after crushing is the simplest reading. The result tastes very sweet on a spoon because it is designed to be diluted by soda water, ice cream or shaved ice.
- "Finely crushed"Crush by hand with a masher or the back of a ladle so the fruit stays in visible flecks. A blender turns it to purée, which suspends evenly and loses the point of ladling fruit.
- Green GageA greengage is a small green-gold dessert plum, still sold in season in Europe and at some farm markets. Any ripe, sweet-tart plum stands in; peel and pit before crushing.
- OrangeHere this means crushed flesh and juice, not zest or peel. Segment the fruit and remove the membranes, which turn bitter after a day in syrup.
- Berries and stone fruitStrawberries, raspberries and blackberries need no cooking. Peaches and apricots should be peeled; blanch them 30 seconds to slip the skins, or the skin shows up as tough curls in the bowl.
- Half-gallon jars, and holding itThe original assumes a busy counter turning over stock daily. Refrigerate these instead of standing them out, and use within about a week. Do not treat "put up in jars" as a canning instruction; there is no processing time, acidity measurement or headspace given here, and sugar alone will not make the jars shelf stable.
- YieldAt one part fruit to two parts syrup, a half-gallon jar takes roughly 1 1/3 pints of crushed fruit to 2 2/3 pints of syrup. Serving size is not given; a ladleful of a couple of ounces per soda or sundae is a reasonable guess.
Crushed fruits were the working stock of the American soda fountain in its heyday, roughly the 1880s through the 1920s, when a druggist's counter dealt in syrup and ice cream alongside medicine. A fountain kept two families of flavoring side by side: bottled extract syrups for the standard sodas, and these bowls of crushed fruit for the more expensive drinks and for sundaes, where visible pieces of fruit justified the higher price. The list here is a fair picture of what a good fountain could get in season or in tins, including greengage plum. The fruit was dispensed from a bowl kept on the counter with a ladle in it.