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Cherry Phosphate
American Wild Cherry Juice, 1 quart; Simple Syrup, 1 gallon. Acid Phosphate, a few dashes in each tumbler.
Dispense a liberal amount of soda water, and the result will be delicious.
A fountain formula written for a dispenser working from stock bottles, so it gives bulk quantities rather than a single drink. Scaled down and with the proportions pinned to a glass, it works exactly as written.
- The working ratioOne quart of cherry juice to one gallon of simple syrup is 1:4. For a single drink, mix 1 part wild cherry juice to 4 parts syrup and use about 1 to 1.5 fl oz of that blend per glass.
- Acid phosphate is the pointThis is a dilute food-grade phosphoric acid solution, sold for soda fountains and still made for bar use. It gives a dry, mineral tartness that citric acid does not; lemon juice makes a different drink. Do not substitute laboratory or hardware-grade phosphoric acid.
- "A few dashes"Roughly 1/4 teaspoon per glass, adjusted to taste; much past about 1/2 teaspoon in an 8 oz glass will taste harsh to most palates.
- Tumbler sizeFountain tumblers of the period were commonly around 8 fl oz, though sizes varied; the soda was charged under pressure into the glass over the syrup. Chilled seltzer from a siphon or bottle, poured onto the syrup rather than stirred in, gets closest.
- Simple syrupFountain simple syrup was heavier than the 1:1 kitchen standard, commonly about 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight. Use the richer syrup or the finished drink will taste thin.
- Wild cherry juiceThis meant juice or syrup from American wild or black cherry, astringent and faintly bitter-almond in character, not the sweet Bing type. Bottled tart cherry juice is the nearest supermarket stand-in; expect a rounder, less medicinal flavor. Use the fruit only, never crushed pits, leaves or bark, which carry cyanogenic compounds.
- Keeping and yieldThe full batch makes about 5 quarts (160 fl oz) of flavoring syrup, enough for roughly a hundred or more glasses at 1 to 1.5 oz each. Refrigerate it; without preservatives a fruit syrup holds a couple of weeks at most.
Phosphates were the dry counterpart to the sweeter soda-fountain sodas, and they depended on acid phosphate, a phosphoric acid preparation generally traced to the chemist Eben Horsford and marketed from the 1870s by Rumford Chemical Works as both a beverage acidulant and a nerve tonic. That double identity is why formulas like this one sat comfortably in a druggist's fountain manual: the soda counter grew out of the pharmacy, and its flavorings came from the same shelves. Wild cherry in particular had a long life as a medicinal flavor, since syrup of wild cherry bark was a standard cough vehicle in the American pharmacopoeia, and its slight astringency made it a natural partner for the tart bite of the phosphate. Cherry phosphate outlasted most of its siblings and was still a lunch-counter fixture well into the twentieth century, long after anyone claimed it was good for the nerves.