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Apple Jack-Frosted
Six green apples, sour. Stick them with 36 cloves, and half bake them. In a glass or porcelain dish put 36 allspice, 1 lemon sliced thin, and the apples while hot. Cover all with sugar. Let stand 12 hours. Add 1 quart syrup, and stew until they fall to pieces, except the core, take off the fire before that separates. Let cool, and slice a lemon very thin, and over all 2 bananas. Add ¼ teaspoonful powdered cinnamon, 2 teaspoonfuls Extract Jamaica ginger, 4 of vanilla, and enough syrup to make ½ gallon. Serve 2 tablespoonfuls to glass, with same quantity cream or ice cream, and fill with small stream. See that each glass has a slice of lemon and banana in it.
This is a fountain syrup, not a dessert: the apple mixture is cooked down, diluted to a half gallon, and then dispensed two tablespoons at a time under carbonated water. Read it as a batch of roughly 32 servings.
- "Syrup" means simple syrupIn fountain books plain syrup is a heavy sugar syrup, boiled and cooled; proportions vary from book to book, in the region of the pharmacist's simple syrup. Substituting corn syrup or a thin sugar solution will leave the finished product watery and unstable.
- Half bake the applesThe recipe gives no temperature or time: roast the clove-studded apples only until the skins begin to split and the flesh gives to a skewer. They finish cooking in the sugar and syrup later, and fully baked fruit collapses before the maceration is done.
- The hinge: pull it off the heat earlyThe instruction to stop stewing before the cores separate is the whole technique: once the cores break loose, seeds and core fibre are in the syrup and cannot be strained out cleanly. Watch the pan from the moment the flesh starts to slump.
- Whole spices, not groundThe 36 cloves and 36 allspice are whole, used for infusion. The recipe does not say to strain, though you may prefer to lift the spices out before diluting to volume so the syrup does not keep sharpening. The quarter teaspoon of cinnamon at the end is the only ground spice called for.
- Extract Jamaica gingerAn alcoholic ginger tincture of the sort stocked by period druggists, stronger than most modern culinary ginger extracts. Begin with half the stated two teaspoons, taste the diluted syrup, and add more; ginger dominates quickly.
- Vanilla in teaspoons"4 of vanilla" continues the previous unit, so four teaspoons of vanilla extract. That is a large amount by dessert standards but correct here, since each glass receives only two tablespoons of syrup.
- The bananas will darkenSliced bananas oxidise fast. Slice them in as directed if you want the flavour, but plan to use the batch within a day or two; the sliced fruit garnish should be cut fresh per glass.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative beyond sugar and the alcohol in the extracts. Refrigerate the finished half gallon and treat it as a fresh fruit syrup with about a week of life, not a shelf-stable bottling.
- ServingTwo tablespoons of syrup and an equal two tablespoons of cream or ice cream in the glass, then fill from the fine or 'small' stream of the soda draft, which fills without foaming over. Without a fountain, use well-chilled seltzer poured slowly down the side of the glass.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries filled hundreds of pages with syrups like this one, the dispenser being expected to compound his own flavours from fruit, spice, and druggist's extracts rather than buy them ready-made. The name looks like a play on words: apple jack was the familiar American apple brandy, made by distillation and, in the older farm practice, by freezing out hard cider, while jack frost would supply the chill and the seasonal association with sour green apples and warm baking spice. No brandy appears in the formula, and fountain names often borrowed the glamour of bar drinks without the liquor. The Extract of Jamaica Ginger listed here was a standard pharmacy preparation of the period, stocked as a stomach remedy as much as a flavouring, and its presence is a reminder of how closely the American soda fountain was tied to the drugstore counter.