Home › At the Fountain › Banana Syrup (American Extract Banana ounce)
Banana Syrup (American Extract Banana ounce)
American Extract Banana, 1 ounce; American Fruit Acid, 1; American Yellow Vegetable Color, 66. American Soda Foam Simple Syrup, 1 gallon.
This is a fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: a flavoring extract, an acid, a color and a bulk syrup base, combined cold and pumped over carbonated water by the glass. Everything in it is a trade-house product, so the work of modernizing is mostly translation.
- The numbers are not all the same unitThe extract is given in ounces and the acid presumably likewise, the unit having been carried over. The "66" for the yellow color cannot be ounces: sixty-six ounces of coloring in a gallon of syrup is impossible. It may be a drop or minim count, or a printer's error; treat it as ambiguous rather than converting it with confidence. Color to the shade you want, a few drops at a time.
- "American" is a brand, not a description"American" looks like a trade name rather than a description — these read as catalog products of a soda-fountain supply house rather than generic ingredients. Use a commercial banana flavoring, food-grade citric acid, and any yellow food coloring.
- American Fruit AcidTrade "fruit acid" was generally a solution of citric or tartaric acid in water, but the strength is not stated here and cannot be recovered from the formula. Do not read the "1" as an ounce of dry citric acid powder; start with a small quantity dissolved in a little hot water and taste.
- Soda Foam simple syrupFountain simple syrup was generally heavier than a modern 1:1, running closer to 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight, which keeps it shelf-stable and gives body in the glass. "Soda Foam" may indicate a foaming agent in the base, such as gum arabic or a saponin extract, though it may equally be no more than part of the trade name.
- Do not heat the extractThe hinge of the formula. Banana flavoring of this era was largely isoamyl acetate, which is volatile and flashes off in a warm syrup. Make and cool the simple syrup first, then stir in extract, acid and color.
- Add the acid last, and slowlyAcid dropped into warm syrup begins inverting the sugar and can thin a heavy syrup over time. Cold syrup, acid stirred in at the end, bottled and refrigerated.
- YieldOne gallon is 128 fluid ounces. At the standard fountain pour of about 1 to 1½ ounces of syrup per glass topped with carbonated water, that is roughly 85 to 125 drinks — worth scaling to a quart or a pint unless you are running a counter.
Formula books like this one were written for the druggist behind the marble counter, not the home cook, which is why the ingredients read as catalog numbers: the supply houses sold extracts, acids, colors and syrup bases, and the dispenser's job was to combine them in fixed proportion and keep the shade consistent from week to week. Banana became a fountain staple in the decades after the Central American fruit trade made the fresh fruit cheap and familiar in American cities in the 1880s and 1890s, but the flavor in the bottle was rarely fruit. Isoamyl acetate, the ester generally credited with the characteristic banana note and long sold in industry as "banana oil," was easy to make, stable and far stronger than any purée, which is why period banana sodas, candies and ices share a taste that resembles the idea of a banana more than the thing itself.