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Apricot Syrup
American Concentrated Apricot Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 3 quarts; Fruit Acid, 1 ounce.
This is a dispensing formula rather than a cooking recipe: four parts liquid blended cold, to be held in a fountain bottle and drawn off an ounce at a time. Everything hinges on knowing what the trade names meant.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" (also called simple or stock syrup) was a heavy sugar syrup, roughly 6 to 7 lb of sugar dissolved per gallon of water — near saturation, so it kept without spoiling. A thin 1:1 simple syrup will give a watery, quick-souring result.
- American concentrated apricot syrupApparently a trade name for a bought-in commercial concentrate, presumably apricot juice or pulp reduced and sweetened, cut with plain syrup at the counter. The nearest modern stand-in is a thick unsweetened apricot puree or a strained, reduced apricot nectar; jarred apricot preserves pressed through a sieve also works.
- Fruit acid is the ambiguous itemIn books of this kind "fruit acid" can mean either the dry crystals (citric or tartaric) or a prepared solution of acid in water; both usages occur. The original does not say which was meant, so add the acid a little at a time and taste.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesOunces here -- The quart measures are liquid measure. The ounce of fruit acid could be either: a fluid ounce if a prepared solution was meant, an ounce by weight if crystals.
- YieldOne gallon of finished syrup — about 100 to 128 drinks at 1 to 1 1/4 oz of syrup per glass, topped with 6 to 8 oz of cold carbonated water and stirred once.
- Keeping itCommercial concentrates of this period often carried preservatives that a homemade puree does not. A batch built from fresh fruit should be refrigerated and used within a week or two; scale the formula down rather than making a full gallon.
- BalanceConcentrated fruit syrups vary enormously in strength. Treat 1 part concentrate to 3 parts plain syrup as a starting ratio and adjust — apricot fades fast against carbonation, and under-dosing tastes only of sugar.
This belongs to the golden age of the drugstore fountain, when a dispenser kept a range of labelled syrup bottles and many flavors were compounded rather than bought finished. Recipes of this kind are essentially dilution instructions: the hard work of extracting and preserving the fruit was done by wholesale supply houses, whose "concentrated" syrups the fountain man cut with his own stock of plain syrup to a strength that suited his trade and his margin. The added acid does two jobs at once — it restores the tartness lost to heavy sugar, and it makes the flavor read as fruit against the sharpness of carbonated water, which is why fruit formulas of this kind commonly end with a dose of it. Apricots reached the fountain largely through California, whose orchards and canneries were by the turn of the twentieth century the dominant American source, sending the fruit east as canned halves, dried slabs and concentrated juice.