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Cherry Cobbler Syrup
Cherry juice, 2 pints, sherry wine, 2 pints, granulated sugar, 6 pounds. Dissolve percolation, and add fruit acid, 1 ounce. Mix and strain.
A pre-Prohibition fountain syrup: sweetened sherry and cherry juice, made cold and dispensed by the ounce over shaved ice and soda. The instructions assume a druggist's percolator and a druggist's shorthand.
- Do not heat it"Dissolve percolation" means cold percolation — the sugar was packed in a cone and the liquid drawn through it repeatedly until dissolved. The point is to keep both the fresh cherry flavour and the wine's alcohol intact. Cold agitation in a sealed jar over several hours does the same job; boiling ruins the syrup this recipe is aiming for.
- Fruit acidIn fountain and pharmacy books "fruit acid" usually means citric acid, sometimes tartaric, and it was sold both as crystals and as a ready-made solution. One ounce of crystals in roughly a gallon of syrup is about half a percent — sharp but within reason; one ounce of a dilute solution would be barely detectable. The original does not say which, so add a little at a time and taste.
- Cherry juiceThis most likely means sour cherry juice, of the Morello or Montmorency type, pressed and settled, rather than the sweetened cherry drink sold today; the original does not specify. Modern unsweetened tart cherry juice is the closest match. Sweet-cherry juice will leave the syrup flat even with the acid in it.
- Sugar load and yieldSix pounds of granulated sugar to four pints of liquid is a heavy fountain syrup, though a shade lighter than the standard simple syrup of the period. It yields a little under a gallon of finished syrup — roughly 90 to 100 drinks at the usual one to one and a half ounces per glass. Scale to a quarter or an eighth unless you are actually running a counter.
- StorageA syrup this heavy may throw sugar crystals if chilled, since the alcohol lowers the sugar's solubility. Keep it at cool room temperature in a full, tightly closed bottle; the sugar and the acid together do most of the preserving, and the wine helps.
- It contains alcoholSherry at roughly 15-20 percent makes up half the liquid before the sugar goes in; once the sugar is dissolved the finished syrup lands somewhere around 5 percent. A one-ounce serving carries very little, but it is not nothing — worth knowing before pouring it for children or anyone abstaining.
- Strain properlyCherry juice and wine both drop sediment. Strain through several layers of cloth or a coffee filter, not a kitchen sieve, or the syrup will look cloudy in the glass and cloud the soda water too.
The name points back to the sherry cobbler, the sherry-sugar-citrus-and-crushed-ice drink often said to be the most famous American refreshment of the mid-nineteenth century — the one Dickens singled out for praise in Martin Chuzzlewit after tasting it on his 1842 tour. Soda fountains, which were run by druggists and competed directly with bars, made a business of translating bar drinks into syrups: the fountain man wanted a bottle he could pump from, not a recipe he had to build glass by glass. Fitting a wine cobbler into a syrup bottle is exactly that logic, with the shaved ice and soda supplied at the counter. Formulas like this one largely faded from American fountain books once national Prohibition took effect in January 1920 under the Volstead Act, which removed the sherry and left the trade with the fruit syrups and phosphates it is now remembered for.