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Blackberry Syrup
American Blackberry Juice, 1 quart.
Add enough simple syrup to make 11½ gallons, 2 ounces American Fruit Acid and ¾ ounce American Soda Foam. If 10 pounds syrup is used, add 2 pounds sugar to the juice and dissolve by stirring or by slight heat, but avoid boiling.
This is trade formula, written for a druggist filling a fountain jar rather than a cook filling a bottle. Everything about it assumes bulk volumes, bulk syrup sold by weight, and two proprietary compounds you will have to translate.
- The quantity is almost certainly a misprintThe quantity looks like a misprint -- one quart of juice could not flavour 11½ gallons of syrup at any usable strength. Read it as 1½ gallons, which gives roughly one part juice to five of simple syrup.
- Simple syrup at fountain strengthSoda-fountain simple syrup was heavy -- commonly in the region of 7 lb of sugar to the gallon of finished syrup, close to saturation, so that it would hold up against melting ice and carbonated water. Household simple syrup at 1:1 will taste thin and watery once drawn.
- Syrup sold by weightThe last sentence deals with a syrup identified by weight or strength rather than by the gallon. On one reading ten pounds is a little under a gallon and carries less sugar than the formula assumes, so 2 lb of sugar is dissolved into the juice to bring the finished density back up; the exact sense of '10 pounds syrup' is not certain.
- Avoid boiling, and whyThis is the hinge. Heat above a bare simmer drives off the volatile aroma that makes blackberry taste like blackberry and dulls the colour toward brown. Warm gently -- the 'slight heat' of the original -- stir until the sugar is gone, and stop.
- American Fruit AcidA proprietary acid solution, in practice a strong solution of citric or tartaric acid, sometimes both. Two ounces in a gallon and a half is a tartness adjustment, not a preservative; substitute citric acid dissolved in water and add it to taste at the end rather than by the stated weight.
- American Soda FoamThe foaming agents of the era were saponin extracts, usually quillaia (soap bark) or yucca. Quillaia extract is still permitted in beverages at controlled levels but is not a domestic ingredient, and its only function here is head retention. Leave it out and the syrup is unaffected in flavour.
- Yield and dosingAt the fountain, 1 to 1½ fl oz of syrup went into the glass before the carbonated water, giving roughly 6 to 8 oz finished. A gallon and a half of syrup is therefore something like 130 to 190 drinks; scale the whole formula down by a factor of ten or more for home use.
- KeepingThere is no preservative here beyond sugar, and the acid alone will not hold it. A modern batch should go into the refrigerator and be used within a few weeks, or be frozen in portions.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one were written for pharmacists, who ran the fountain as an extension of the dispensary and bought their flavour bases, acids and foaming compounds from supply houses under brand names now long gone. Blackberry was one of the staples of the American fountain, partly because the fruit was abundant and cheap across the eastern states and partly because blackberry cordial and blackberry syrup already carried a domestic reputation as a remedy for summer bowel complaint, a folk association that made the flavour familiar to customers before they ever saw it on a fountain card. The instruction to buy syrup by the pound rather than the gallon may be a small window on the trade, though a single ambiguous line will not bear much weight: it hints that stock syrup was handled by weight rather than by measure, and perhaps that the druggist was expected to know how to correct its density with sugar.