Home › At the Fountain › Cherry Phosphate Syrup
Cherry Phosphate Syrup
The Best of Its Kind and the Kind the Best.
American Cherry Phosphate, 1 pint; Plain Syrup, 1 gallon. Mix thoroughly.
Two ingredients and a stir, but both of them are trade goods rather than groceries, and neither means quite what a modern reader assumes. This makes about 18 pints of finished syrup, enough for well over a hundred drinks.
- What "American Cherry Phosphate" wasNot a fruit product but a compounded flavouring sold to fountains in bottles: cherry flavour carried in a solution of dilute phosphoric acid, usually with colouring. The nearest modern equivalent is a good cherry extract or syrup base plus a food-grade acid phosphate solution, which is still manufactured for bar and fountain use.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" or "simple syrup" of the period was heavy — on the order of 6 to 7 lb of granulated sugar to the gallon, not the 1:1 syrup most bars keep now. A thinner syrup will give a weak, watery drink at the standard pour.
- The ratio is the whole recipeOne part flavour to eight parts syrup. If your cherry base is stronger or weaker than a 1900 fountain bottle, adjust by tasting a finished glass, not the syrup: everything is about to be diluted six or seven times with carbonated water.
- How it was servedAn ounce to an ounce and a half of the finished syrup in a glass, drawn up with cold carbonated water from the fine stream, then coarse to finish. Some dispensers also added a separate dash of acid phosphate at the glass for extra bite.
- Bitter almondPeriod cherry flavours leaned on benzaldehyde for the kernel note. Use commercial food-grade cherry or almond extract; oil of bitter almonds as sold in the era carried hydrocyanic acid and is not a home ingredient.
- KeepingA fountain went through a gallon quickly and kept syrups in a cooled crock or jar. With no preservative, a batch this size may ferment or mould in a home refrigerator before you finish it — better to mix a pint or two at a time.
- Acidity and colourThe phosphoric acid keeps the syrup tart and bright, and acidity generally helps red colourings hold. Expect a dry, mineral tang quite unlike a modern cherry soda, which is the point of a phosphate.
Phosphates were one of the standard families of fountain drinks, alongside the sweeter, foamier egg and cream preparations. The style is usually traced to Horsford's Acid Phosphate, a dilute phosphoric acid preparation carrying lime, magnesia and other salts, sold from the 1870s as a tonic and taken up by dispensers because a dash of it made a sugar syrup taste sharp and clean rather than cloying. Cherry was among the most popular of the phosphate flavours, and by the turn of the century a druggist could buy the whole flavour ready compounded under a brand name — which is exactly what this entry assumes. Formularies like this one were written for the man behind the counter, not the cook: the trade supplied the difficult part in a bottle, and the book's job was to tell him how much plain syrup to cut it with. The boosterish first line is the tone of the whole genre, half instruction and half advertising copy.