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Banana Syrup (Prepared as follows Cut)
The syrup is prepared as follows: Cut the fruit in slices and place in a jar, cover with sugar and cover the jar, which is then enveloped in straw and placed in cold water, and the latter is heated to the boiling point. The jar is then removed, allowed to cool, and the juice is poured into small bottles. To 1 pint of this juice add 2 pints plain syrup and ½ ounce fruit acid. Do not have your syruptoothick as it does not mix well.
A fountain syrup rather than a preserve: the sugar draws juice out of the fruit, gentle heat in a water bath sets the flavor, and the strained liquid is cut with plain syrup and acid for the soda dispenser. Two things in the original need translating before you start — "plain syrup" and "fruit acid."
- Plain syrupIn fountain usage this is an unflavored heavy simple syrup; manuals of the period generally call for something in the region of two parts sugar to one part water by weight, boiled just until clear. It is thicker than the 1:1 syrup usual in a home kitchen.
- Fruit acidCitric or tartaric acid in crystal form, sold to fountains by the ounce. Half an ounce (about 14 g) to three pints of finished syrup is a real dose — it is there to brighten flat banana and to keep the sugar from crystallizing. Start with half that and taste; dissolve it in a spoonful of warm water before stirring it in.
- The straw jacketWrapping the jar in straw and starting it in cold water is thermal-shock insurance for annealed glass. A modern canning jar on a rack in a pot of cold water, brought slowly to a simmer, does the same job.
- How much juice bananas actually giveBananas are starchy and hold their liquid, so expect a thick pulpy extract rather than a clean juice. Press the softened fruit through a fine sieve or a jelly bag. The recipe gives no proportion of sugar to fruit beyond 'cover with sugar,' and no indication of how much fruit yields a pint of juice.
- BrowningCut banana oxidizes within minutes. Slice directly into the sugar and get the jar covered — the finished syrup will still be tan rather than pale, which is normal. Adding a little of the fruit acid to the fruit at the start helps hold the color.
- "Not too thick"The closing line is the hinge. A heavy syrup will streak and sink in a glass of carbonated water instead of blending. Thin with a little water until it pours freely off a spoon, and check by mixing one ounce of syrup into six ounces of soda water.
- Keeping itThis is a fresh syrup, not a shelf-stable preserve — bottling warm liquid into untreated bottles is not a canning process. Refrigerate and use within a week or two; discard at any sign of fermentation or a yeasty smell.
- YieldThe finished quantity is three pints, enough for roughly forty-five to fifty eight-ounce sodas at an ounce of syrup each.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one existed because the druggist was expected to compound his own flavors from whatever the fruit market offered, and by the 1890s and 1900s that market included bananas in quantity. Improvements in shipping and the consolidation of the Central American fruit trade turned the banana from a curiosity into one of the cheapest fruits in an American city, and fountain operators followed the price. The method here sugar drawing juice from raw fruit, then a gentle water-bath heating rather than an open boil is often said to have been the usual trade approach to delicate flavors, since hard boiling drives off the volatile aromatics that a customer is paying for. The instruction to keep the syrup thin is the mark of a working fountain man: syrup that will not disperse in charged water makes a bad glass no matter how good it tastes off the spoon.