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Cherry Earl
Very popular: simply maraschino cherries poured over ice cream. Cherry Ferri--American The greatest nerve tonic of the age. Use one ounce to glass, fill glass with solid soda, stir and serve.
Two fountain formulas printed as one entry: a cherry sundae that needs no explanation, and a medicated soda that cannot be reproduced today. The notes below cover the fountain vocabulary and the reason the second drink is off the table.
- "Cherry Ferri" is a drug preparation, not a flavouring"Cherry Ferri" reads as a drug preparation rather than a plain flavouring -- Ferri is the pharmacist's Latin genitive of ferrum, "of iron," and cherry syrup was a common vehicle for masking the metallic taste of iron salts. Period "nerve tonics" sold under such names often combined an iron salt with quinine, and some formulas added strychnine. The book names no composition, so there is no way to know what an ounce of it contained.
- An ounce of an unknown tonic is not a safe quantityA full ounce -- two tablespoons -- of a compounded medicinal syrup, dispensed to order and repeated as often as the customer liked, is a dose, not a serving. Nothing in the entry establishes strength, so no modern substitution or scaling is possible. Iron preparations in particular are dangerous in overdose.
- The claim in the text is advertising"The greatest nerve tonic of the age" is fountain-counter copy of the kind that circulated before the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, which required labels to declare a specified list of substances. Read it as a sales line rather than a description of effect.
- "Solid soda"Fountain draught could be drawn either as foam or as liquid carbonated water. To fill with solid soda is to fill the glass with the liquid stream, giving a full glass rather than a head of foam.
- The glassA standard soda glass of the period held roughly 8 to 10 ounces, so an ounce of syrup to a filled glass is about a one-to-eight dilution -- lighter than most modern flavoured sodas.
- The Cherry Earl halfThe first line is a plain sundae: maraschino cherries spooned over ice cream, the flavour unspecified. Fountain maraschinos of this period were typically bleached and re-dyed cherries preserved in syrup, closer to today's cocktail cherry than to a cherry cured in maraschino liqueur. One scoop with a spoonful of cherries makes a serving.
American soda fountains grew out of drugstores, and for most of the nineteenth century the counter and the dispensary were the same business. Carbonated water was first sold as a health measure, and the syrups that flavoured it shaded without a clear line into materia medica: phosphates, celery compounds, beef-and-iron preparations, coca extracts and iron tonics all appeared on fountain lists beside chocolate and vanilla. A name like Cherry Ferri sits exactly on that line -- an iron preparation dressed in cherry syrup and sold as refreshment. Fountain guides of this type were trade manuals for the dispenser, printing sundae formulas and medicated drinks on the same page because the same man made both. Federal labelling law after 1906, and the gradual separation of the lunch counter from the prescription desk, pushed the tonics off the menu and left the sundaes behind.