Home › At the Fountain › Cherry Cocktail (Make up a gallon of cherry)
Cherry Cocktail (Make up a gallon of cherry)
Make up a gallon of cherry phosphate syrup by mixing one pint American Cherry Phosphate Extract with one gallon plain syrup; this makes an absolutely unique cherry phosphate, and is one of our best sellers. Draw an ounce in a mineral glass, fill with solid soda, stick an American Maraschino Cherry on a wooden toothpick and drop in the glass. Customer enjoys the drink and finishes by eating the cherry off the end of the toothpick, and goes away pleased.
A soda fountain formula rather than a kitchen one: it assumes a syrup pump, a carbonator and a house-brand flavoring extract. All of it translates, provided you understand what the trade words mean.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" or "simple syrup" of this era was heavy — roughly 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight, cooked just enough to dissolve, so it kept without fermenting and did not thin the drink. Modern 1:1 syrup will taste watery at one ounce per glass.
- Cherry phosphate extractA proprietary product: cherry flavoring, probably compounded with acid phosphate, the sour agent that gave phosphates their name and their dry bite (some fountains instead dashed the acid phosphate in separately). Substitute a cherry syrup plus a few dashes of food-grade acid phosphate (a dilute phosphoric acid solution still sold for cocktails and sodas); citric acid is not the same taste, being sharper and fruitier.
- ProportionsOne pint of extract to one gallon of syrup is about 1:8, and yields a gallon and a pint, not a gallon — the book is naming the syrup base, not the finished volume. At one ounce per drink, a gallon and a pint (144 ounces) makes roughly 144 sodas.
- Mineral glassProbably a tall, straight-sided fountain glass of something like 8 to 10 ounces. Roughly one ounce of syrup to eight of soda water was a common fountain ratio; adjust to nine or ten ounces if you like it lighter.
- "Solid soda"The hinge of the drink. Solid means filling with carbonated water alone, no whipping and no foam head, so the drink stays sharply carbonated. Pour the soda down the side of the glass onto the syrup and do not stir hard.
- Chill everythingCarbonation holds only in cold liquid. Refrigerate the syrup and use soda water straight from the refrigerator, or the drink goes flat before it reaches the table.
- The cherry"Maraschino" cherries of this period ranged from Marasca or Royal Anne cherries genuinely preserved in maraschino liqueur to the cheaper American imitation, cherries in a flavored, often dyed brine; a house-brand product like this one may well have been the latter. Any good cocktail cherry serves; the toothpick is not decoration but the delivery mechanism the text describes.
The book belongs to a genre of trade manual published by flavoring and fountain-supply houses, whose recipes double as advertisements — note that the extract and the cherry are both named as house products, and that the closing line about the pleased customer is aimed at the druggist's ledger rather than his palate. Phosphates were a mainstay of the American soda fountain from the later nineteenth century into the twentieth: acid phosphate, a dilute phosphoric acid preparation sold by pharmaceutical supply firms, gave a dry, mineral tartness quite unlike lemon or lime, and pharmacists blended it with fruit syrups by the gallon. Cherry was among the more durable of those flavors, and the garnish trick here — a cherry speared on a toothpick, eaten last — is a small piece of counter showmanship from a period when the soda clerk was expected to perform as much as to mix.