Home › At the Fountain › Blood Orange Syrup
Blood Orange Syrup
American Concentrated Blood Orange Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 3 quarts; Fruit Acid, 1 ounce. If your fountain is small, serve the well-known popular flavors. Do not attempt to introduce new drinks.
This is a fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: a concentrate is cut with sugar syrup and acidulated to make a gallon of finished dispensing syrup. Most of the work is understanding what the three named ingredients were.
- YieldThe formula makes one gallon of finished syrup, which at the standard fountain pour of about 1 to 1.5 fluid ounces per glass is roughly 85 to 125 drinks. Scale down by eighths if you want a workable pint.
- Plain syrupTrade shorthand for simple syrup, and in this period a heavy one: period fountain formulas commonly give something like 13 pounds of sugar to the gallon of water, which works out closer to 1.5 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight. A modern 1:1 syrup will give a noticeably thinner, less stable result.
- Fruit acidNot a fruit extract but a solution of citric or tartaric acid in water, sold by the drug and soda trade; published strengths varied, commonly somewhere around 20 to 25 percent. One ounce in a gallon of syrup is a small correction for tartness, not a preservative; dry citric acid used measure for measure would be far too sour.
- Concentrated blood orange syrupApparently a proprietary supply-house concentrate, not available in this form today. The nearest substitutes are blood orange juice reduced with sugar, or a commercial blood orange puree concentrate; either is likely to be less sweet than the original and will shift the sugar balance of the whole gallon.
- Blood oranges themselvesMoro, Tarocco and Sanguinello are the common varieties; colour depends on cold nights during ripening, so fruit varies from faintly freckled to deep garnet. Juice for syrup should be strained, as the pulp settles and clouds the bottle.
- Keeping itFountain syrups were made in quantity for a trade that turned them over quickly. With no benzoate or other preservative, a gallon left at room temperature can ferment; keep it refrigerated and treat it as a two-week item, or freeze in portions.
- The closing advice"Do not attempt to introduce new drinks" is counsel to the proprietor, not part of the method, and reflects a trade where a small fountain's profit came from fast turnover of familiar flavours.
Blood oranges reached American markets largely from Sicily and Malta, and by the turn of the twentieth century the fruit was familiar enough that soda-fountain supply houses sold a ready-made concentrate under its name. Formulas like this one show how the fountain actually worked: the druggist bought concentrates and heavy plain syrup by the gallon and blended to a house standard, adjusting sharpness with a bottle of fruit acid rather than with fresh juice. The blunt instruction at the end belongs to the same commercial world, where soda books doubled as business manuals and warned operators that a small fountain made its money on the well-known popular flavors. Blood orange syrup was an ambitious flavour, offered here with the caution that only a large trade could carry it.