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Beef, Wine and Iron Syrup
Beef, Wine and Iron, 8 ounces; Vanilla Syrup, 24 ounces. Mix well. Draw 2 ounces of this syrup in a mineral glass and fill with solid soda.
This is a dispensing formula from the era when the soda fountain sat in a drugstore and the soda clerk was also the pharmacist's assistant. Its central ingredient was a medicine, and that is why it cannot be reproduced.
- What "Beef, Wine and Iron" wasA proprietary tonic of beef extract, sherry or a similar fortified wine, and an iron salt — commonly iron and ammonium citrate or tincture of ferric chloride. It was sold by the bottle as a restorative for anaemia and convalescence, and strengths varied from maker to maker.
- Why the iron is the problemIron preparations are dosed by the spoonful, and doses were scaled down for children. This formula puts 8 ounces of an unstandardised medicinal iron tonic into 24 ounces of vanilla syrup, making 32 ounces, and then serves 2 ounces of the result at a time, with no label and no idea of the elemental iron per glass. Acute iron poisoning is a recognised and serious hazard in small children, and there is no way to compound this at home within a known range.
- The wine, undisclosedThe finished drink also carries whatever fortified wine the tonic contained, served across a counter as a soft drink. A modern soda-fountain recreation should use a current recipe with a named, measured ingredient.
- "Solid soda"Fountain jargon: plain carbonated water drawn from the fine stream under pressure, filling the glass without the coarse foaming spray. It is the opposite of "draw with the coarse stream," which was used to build a head of foam.
- The mineral glassA fountain glass used for mineral (plain soda) water rather than a modern soda glass. Two ounces of syrup filled out with soda is a heavy draw by fountain standards, which is part of why these syrups taste punishingly sweet on their own.
- The vanilla syrup's jobBeef extract and iron salts are savoury, metallic and astringent. The 3:1 dilution in vanilla syrup looks intended largely to mask that flavour.
- YieldThe mix makes 32 ounces of syrup, enough for sixteen glasses at 2 ounces each.
Soda fountains in the United States grew out of pharmacies, and books like this one were written for the clerk who had to turn a shelf of medicinal preparations into something drinkable. Beef, wine and iron tonics were staples of late nineteenth-century home medicine, sold alongside malt extracts and bitters and prescribed for "debility" — the same logic that put coca, kola, celery compound and pepsin on fountain menus. Their reputation rested on the period's belief that beef extract carried the strength of meat in concentrated form, an idea generally traced to Liebig's beef extract work in the 1860s and heavily promoted by the companies that sold it. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and its successors gradually forced such preparations to declare their contents or leave the market, and formulas like this one disappeared from fountain books along with the tonics they depended on.