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Blood Orange
American Blood Orange Extract, 2 ounces; Simple Syrup, 1 gallon; American Soda Foam, ½ ounce; American Fruit Acid, 1 ounce; American Ruby Color, 66.
This is a bottling-house formula rather than a home recipe: a gallon of flavored syrup to be drawn at a fountain and finished with carbonated water. Nearly every ingredient is a trade product sold by a soda-supply house, so the useful work is translating them into things a modern cook can buy.
- What the numbers meanThe whole formula scales around one gallon (128 fl oz) of simple syrup. Two ounces of extract to a gallon is roughly 1.5 percent by volume, so a single quart batch takes half an ounce of extract, a quarter ounce of fruit acid and about an eighth of an ounce of foam.
- "American Ruby Color, 66"The unit is missing in the original and genuinely ambiguous. In fountain formularies a bare number after a coloring may mean drops or minims, though it could equally be a house code for a color grade. Do not guess at a conversion; color to the shade you want, a little at a time.
- Simple syrup, fountain strengthPeriod fountain syrup is heavy, near-saturated stock at roughly 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight, not the 1:1 bar syrup of today. Using 1:1 will give a thin, under-sweet drink at the standard pour.
- Blood orange extractThe trade product was an alcoholic flavoring concentrate, not juice. A modern blood orange extract works; if you substitute juice you are changing the sugar, acid and water balance of the whole gallon and the syrup will not keep as well.
- American Fruit AcidA solution of citric acid, sometimes with tartaric, sold ready-diluted. Modern citric acid is sold as dry crystals, which are far stronger by weight than the old liquid preparation. Dissolve and add to taste rather than matching the ounce measure.
- American Soda FoamA foaming agent, historically an extract of quillaia (soapbark) or a similar saponin, added so the drawn drink held a head. Quillaia extract is still permitted in soft drinks in regulated amounts; if you cannot source a food-grade product, leave it out. The drink loses its head and nothing else.
- ColoringThe ruby colors of the period were coal-tar dyes, several of which were later withdrawn from food use. Any modern red food coloring gives the intended effect.
- Yield and servingDrawing 1 to 1.5 fl oz of syrup into an 8 oz glass, a gallon of syrup makes roughly eighty-five to one hundred and twenty-five glasses. Fill with cold carbonated water, stirring only briefly so the gas stays in.
- KeepingHeavy syrup with added acid is stable at cool room temperature in a sealed bottle, but a gallon is a commercial quantity. Scale to a quart unless you are actually running a fountain.
Soda fountain books of this kind are less cookbooks than trade manuals, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter and keyed to the catalog of whichever supply house published them "American" here is a brand prefix, and most of the ingredients in the list would likely have been bought in a labeled bottle rather than made. Blood oranges themselves, the deep-pigmented Sicilian varieties, were prized at the fountain for a color no ordinary orange could give, which may be part of why the formula still calls for added ruby coloring: the extract carried the flavor, the dye carried the name. Formulas like this one, all proportions and no method, assumed a reader who already knew how to cut syrup, charge water and draw a glass, and they survive as a fairly exact record of what a drink advertised as fruit actually contained.