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Cherry Ferri
The greatest nerve tonic of the age. Draw 1 ounce of American Cherry Ferri in a hot soda cup, fill cup with hot water, add whipped cream if desired by customer. Just as fine hot or cold.
A two-ingredient fountain drink whose whole character sits in a proprietary syrup that no longer exists. What survives is the method, which is a useful template for hot fountain service.
- "Draw 1 ounce"Fountain syrup pumps of the period commonly delivered about an ounce per stroke, so an ounce would usually be a single pump, roughly 2 tablespoons. Modern equivalent: 1 fl oz of syrup in the bottom of the cup before any water goes in.
- The hot soda cupA heavy mug of the sort used for hot fountain service, sometimes set in a metal holder. Whatever you use, preheat it with boiling water and tip it out, or the drink is lukewarm by the third sip.
- American Cherry FerriA proprietary syrup rather than a generic flavour. "Ferri" is the Latin genitive of ferrum, iron, and the name points to a ferrated preparation of the sort sold across the fountain counter as a restorative, though the formula is not recorded here. It is long out of production and has no direct replacement.
- Iron tonics generallyPeriod ferrated elixirs carried real medicinal doses of iron salts, often in a sweetened aromatic base. Nothing sold as cherry syrup today does, and no modern iron supplement should be dosed by the fountain ounce.
- If you want the drink itselfA hot cherry soda is worth making on its own terms: an ounce of good tart-cherry syrup, hot water, a spoonful of whipped cream floated on top. It will not be the original, whose formula is unknown, but it is a good hot cherry drink.
- The whipped creamFloat it, do not stir it in. The recipe adds it to the finished cup, where it melts slowly into the first mouthfuls.
- YieldOne cup, about 6 to 8 fl oz depending on the mug — a single serving sold across the counter.
Soda fountains and drugstores shared a counter for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the language of the two blended freely: a fountain manual could advertise a cherry drink as "the greatest nerve tonic of the age" without anyone finding it odd. Iron preparations were among the most widely sold restoratives of the period, prescribed for the vague complaint of debility or "nervous exhaustion," and ferrated syrups let the dispenser sell a dose disguised as a treat. Hot fountain service " hu2014 hot chocolate, hot beef bouillon, hot ginger, hot tonics like this one — was the winter trade that kept the marble counter earning between soda seasons, and the book notes that this one is "just as fine hot or cold." Federal labelling and drug regulation over the following decades gradually separated the pharmacy from the syrup rail, and proprietary tonics of this kind disappeared from the fountain along with their claims.