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Catawba Syrup
Three and one-half quarts of simple syrup, 1 pint of Catawba wine, 2 ounces of soda foam, ½ ounce of citric acid solution. Color red.
A bulk fountain syrup, meant to be drawn an ounce or two at a time into a glass and filled with carbonated water. Everything here is scaled for a dispenser, not a household.
- Simple syrup, fountain strengthSoda-fountain simple syrup was heavier than bar syrup: fountain formulas commonly work out to something like 7 to 8 pounds of sugar per gallon, close to a saturated solution. Ordinary 1:1 bar syrup will give a noticeably thinner, weaker drink.
- Citric acid solutionNot crystals. Fountain guides of the period meant a stock solution of citric acid in water; the strength varies between manuals, often in the region of a pound to a pint. Half an ounce of such a solution is a small correction for tartness against a very sweet base.
- Soda foamA proprietary foaming extract, almost always built on saponin from quillaia (soap bark), sometimes with egg albumen. It exists only to hold a head on the carbonated water. Modern quillaia extract is permitted in beverages at low levels; if you cannot source a beverage-grade foamer, leave it out rather than substituting anything soapy.
- The wineA pint into three and a half quarts is dilute, and the trade treated it as a flavoring rather than as a way of serving alcohol. Catawba is a native American labrusca-family grape with a distinct musky, foxy flavor. A dry Catawba from the Finger Lakes or Ohio is closest; a generic pink blend labelled Catawba will be much sweeter and will push the syrup out of balance.
- Color redOriginal practice meant a coal-tar dye or a cochineal solution, added drop by drop. Carmine or a modern beverage color does the same job; the wine itself contributes almost no color at this dilution.
- Yield and serviceAbout a gallon of finished syrup, or roughly 100 drinks. Draw 1 to 1½ fluid ounces per 8-ounce glass and fill with cold carbonated water; the foam extract is already in the syrup.
- KeepingHeavy syrups resist spoilage by sugar concentration alone, and the book gives no storage note. With the wine and foam extract in it, refrigerate and make in smaller batches unless you are actually running a fountain.
Catawba was the grape that made American commercial winemaking respectable before California: a hardy native variety propagated in the early nineteenth century and taken up by Nicholas Longworth around Cincinnati, whose sparkling Catawba was famous enough by the 1850s for Longfellow to write an ode to it. By the time soda-fountain manuals like this one were being compiled, the name carried that association of a light, faintly musky pink wine, and fountain operators used it the way they used sherry, port and claret syrups "as a flavor with a genteel reputation rather than as a way of serving alcohol. The proportion here, a pint of wine to nearly four quarts of syrup and then diluted again with carbonated water in the glass, suggests something about how the trade may have thought about it: wine as a flavoring note, sold across a counter.