Home › At the Fountain › Cherry Flip
Cherry Flip
Serve 1 ounce of the following syrup with enough water to fill glass: One ounce fluid extract wild cherry, 1 ounce Jamaica rum, 1 ounce acid, sufficient red coloring and syrup enough to make ½ gallon.
This is a druggist's formula rather than a cook's, and two of its four ingredients are unusable as written today. The points below explain what the terms meant and where the recipe fails.
- "Acid" is unspecifiedBehind a soda fountain counter this normally meant a stock solution of citric or tartaric acid, or acid phosphate, each at a different strength. The book names no substance and no concentration, and one ounce of the wrong one in half a gallon of syrup would throw the drink badly out of balance. An instruction that cannot be resolved should not be guessed at.
- Fluid extract of wild cherryThis was a pharmacy preparation of Prunus serotina bark, made to United States Pharmacopoeia strength and valued for the cyanogenic glycosides in the bark, which are what give it both its almond-cherry aroma and its cough-syrup reputation. It is a drug extract, not a flavouring sold for food, and modern wild cherry flavour concentrates are a different thing entirely.
- Red coloring"Sufficient red coloring" meant whatever the fountain kept in its bottle. Several of the coal-tar reds in general use in this period are no longer permitted in food.
- The rum is not a garnishOne ounce of Jamaica rum in half a gallon of syrup works out to a fraction of a teaspoon in a served drink, so it is there for the heavy molasses aroma rather than for strength.
- "Syrup enough to make ½ gallon"Plain simple syrup, the fountain's bulk stock, near-saturated and made in gallon batches. The whole formula yields 64 servings at the specified ounce apiece.
- If you want the drinkA cherry soda built from a current, food-grade cherry syrup is a straightforward thing to make. Use a modern recipe rather than adapting this one.
The soda fountain grew out of the drugstore, and formularies like this one read accordingly: fluid extracts, standardized acids, and quantities scaled to the half gallon in a dispenser's hand. Wild cherry bark was a staple of nineteenth-century American materia medica, sold as a bark syrup for coughs long before it became a flavour, and its migration from the prescription counter to the carbonated-drink list happened under the same roof and often at the hands of the same man. "Flip" is an old name, generally traced to the tavern drink of beer, rum and sugar heated with a red-hot iron, attested from the late seventeenth century; by the time it reached the fountain it had loosened to mean little more than a mixed, frothy drink, and the ounce of Jamaica rum here is the last thread connecting it to the original.