Home › At the Fountain › Buffalo Eleven
Buffalo Eleven
One-fifth ounce pineapple syrup, one-fifth ounce strawberry syrup, one-fifth ounce raspberry syrup, one-fifth ounce vanilla syrup, one-fifth ounce claret syrup, 1 dash acid solution phosphate, ½ ounce plain cream. Ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain drink of five syrups, acid phosphate and cream, built in a shaker rather than a glass. The measures are small and the cream is the fragile part.
- One-fifth ounceA fluid ounce is six teaspoons, so one-fifth ounce is a scant 1¼ teaspoons. Five syrups at that rate give 1 ounce of sweetening in total, and the formula calls for no soda water.
- Acid solution phosphateAcid phosphate is a dilute phosphoric acid solution with calcium, sodium and magnesium salts, sold to fountains as a tart, non-fruity souring agent. It is still made for cocktail and soda work. A "dash" at the fountain meant one squirt of the dasher bottle, roughly ⅛ teaspoon.
- Claret syrupA sweet red syrup tasting of claret; period formulas range from ones built on real claret wine to imitations flavoured and coloured to suggest it. Nothing sold today matches it exactly; a dark grape or black cherry syrup is the nearest thing in colour and weight.
- Plain creamFountain "plain cream" was unwhipped table cream, richer than milk but well short of whipping cream; modern light cream is the closest equivalent. Half-and-half works; heavy cream makes the drink heavier than intended.
- The hinge: acid and creamPhosphoric acid will curdle cream if the two sit together. Add the phosphate to the syrups, ice and cream last, shake hard and briefly, and serve at once. A drink that stands will go grainy at the edges.
- Shake, strain, toss"Toss" here is not an instruction to discard anything; it appears to describe a final pour or transfer of the strained drink, though the exact fountain sense is unclear.
- Yield and glassAbout 1½ ounces of liquid before ice melt — a single small fountain glass. The formula calls for no soda water.
The soda fountain of the 1890s and 1900s ran on syrups, cream and acid phosphate, the last of these a dilute phosphoric-acid preparation that gave a clean sourness without fruit flavour and became a fixture of American dispensing in the later nineteenth century. Recipes like this one belong to the fountain's house-formula tradition: a dispenser combined whatever syrups stood on the rail into a named specialty, and books of the period collected many such formulas, often named for cities, hotels, clubs or teams. The name here is not explained in the text, and fountain names of this type were often local rather than descriptive, so any account of what "Eleven" counted would be guesswork. What the formula does show plainly is the era's taste for compound fruit blends — five syrups at a fifth of an ounce each, none dominant, producing a muddled red "all-flavour" profile.