Home › At the Fountain › Cherry Cream
Cherry Cream
American Wild Cherry Juice, 8 ounces; Fluid Extract Wild Cherry, 1 ounce; American Fruit Acid, 1 dram; Simple Syrup, sufficient to make, 4 pints. Serve 1½ ounces of this syrup with 1 ounce of cream syrup and 8 ounces of carbonated water. It makes a rich, delicious drink, and is well worthy of a trial. Can be used with cracked ice and milk to make milk shakes.
This is a fountain formula, not a single glass: you mix roughly half a gallon of flavoring syrup, then draw drinks from it to order. Most of the work of translating it is in the ingredients, two of which were bought from a druggists' supply house rather than a grocer.
- Yield and what a serving isFour pints is 64 fluid ounces of syrup, and each drink takes 1½ ounces, so the batch makes about forty glasses. Each finished soda is roughly 10½ ounces of liquid before ice.
- The measuresOunces here are fluid ounces throughout. A dram is a fluid dram, one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.7 mL, or roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon. "Sufficient to make 4 pints" means top up with simple syrup after the other three are combined, not add four pints to them.
- Fluid Extract Wild CherryA United States Pharmacopoeia preparation of wild cherry bark, sold by pharmacies as the bitter, almond-scented base of cough syrups. Wild cherry bark is cyanogenic, and modern herbal tinctures sold under that name vary widely in strength and are not food-grade flavorings. A food-grade natural cherry extract is the sensible stand-in; it will give the drink a rounder, sweeter cherry note without the bark's medicinal edge.
- American Fruit AcidA proprietary acid solution of the period; fountain "fruit acids" were generally citric or tartaric acid in solution, used to sharpen fruit flavors, though the exact make-up varied by brand. A few drops of a saturated citric acid solution, or a barspoon of lemon juice, does the same job. Add it last and taste, since fountain acids differed in strength between brands.
- Cream syrupNot cream and not ice cream. Fountain cream syrups were generally cream or evaporated milk cut with simple syrup, often with vanilla, kept cold and pumped like any other syrup. A workable version is equal parts heavy cream and simple syrup with a drop of vanilla; keep it refrigerated and make it in small quantities, as it sours quickly.
- Wild cherry juiceThe fountain article sold as American wild cherry juice was presumably pressed from wild black cherries, and would have been tarter than the sweet dark cherry juice sold now. Sour or Morello cherry juice is likely closer than sweet cherry, and needs less of the added acid.
- AssemblyPut the syrups in the glass first, add an inch or two of carbonated water and stir to break the cream syrup, then fill with a coarse stream. Dumping full-force soda onto cold cream syrup curdles it into flecks.
- Keeping the syrupThe base syrup keeps a couple of weeks refrigerated; the cream syrup is a fresh-dairy product and should be treated like cream, not like a shelf-stable syrup. For the milk shake the book gives no quantity; the same 1½ ounces of base with milk and cracked ice, shaken or blended, is a reasonable starting point.
Soda fountains grew out of drugstores, and formularies like this one were written for the pharmacist behind the counter, which is why a beverage recipe calls for a USP fluid extract and a proprietary fruit acid by name. Wild cherry bark was one of the standard pharmacy flavors of the nineteenth century, familiar to customers from cough preparations, and its slightly bitter almond-and-bark character was thought to give a cherry syrup depth that fruit juice alone could not. Pairing it with cream syrup follows the same taste for dairy at the fountain that produced the ice cream soda: dairy softens the acid bite of carbonated water and turns a thin fruit drink into something that reads as a treat rather than a tonic. The tone of the entry, recommending the drink as "well worthy of a trial," is typical of these books, which were sold to proprietors looking for a house specialty their competitors down the street did not have.