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Chocolate Bouquet
One ounce American Chocolate Syrup, 1 ounce American Orangeade Syrup, in a large soda glass. Add cream or ice cream, and draw fine and coarse stream to fill glass. Chocolate Cream Syrup-American American Cream Chocolate, 1 pint; Plain Syrup, 4 pints. Mix thoroughly with the cold syrup, perfectly soluble.
A soda fountain formula written for a working dispenser, not a home cook: it assumes a carbonated draft arm with two taps and a stock of house syrups. Both parts translate easily once you know what the trade words mean.
- Fine and coarse streamFountain draft arms had two outlets, a fine (needle) stream and a coarse one; period practice on which did the mixing and which the filling was not uniform, and the recipe says only to use both to fill the glass. With a home siphon or a bottle of seltzer, pour a hard splash onto the syrup to mix, then top up gently down the side of the glass.
- The large soda glassA standard large fountain glass held 10 to 12 ounces. Two ounces of syrup plus cream or a scoop of ice cream leaves roughly 8 ounces of carbonated water.
- "American" syrupsThese read as proprietary trade names rather than descriptive ones. Chocolate syrup and orangeade syrup of any decent quality will do; orangeade syrup is essentially sweetened orange juice concentrate with a little acid, so fresh orange juice cut with simple syrup is a fair substitute.
- Plain syrupSimple syrup, but fountain-strength: the trade standard was close to two parts sugar to one part water by weight, far heavier than the 1:1 most modern bars use. Dilute a modern syrup less, or the finished drink will taste thin.
- Chocolate Cream Syrup, scaled downThe second formula is a bulk one, five pints in all. At household scale it is 1 part chocolate cream base to 4 parts plain syrup: 1/2 cup base to 2 cups syrup gives about 2 1/2 cups of finished syrup, enough for about twenty drinks at one ounce each.
- Mix coldThe original directs that the chocolate be combined with the cold syrup, noting it is "perfectly soluble," so no heating is needed. Stir until no streaks remain.
- Cream or ice creamCream makes a chocolate-orange soda; a scoop of vanilla ice cream makes an ice cream soda. Note that the recipe adds the cream or ice cream to the syrups before the carbonated water is drawn.
- YieldOne drink. The syrup formula below it is a batch for the fountain, not part of the single serving.
Soda fountain formularies of this kind circulated in the trade among the dispensers who worked the counters, and branded ingredients appear throughout them. The drink itself is a period exercise in combination: a fountain kept a long row of syrups in pumps along the marble, and much of a dispenser's art lay in pairing two of them and giving the result a name that sounded worth five cents. Chocolate with orange is an old confectioner's affinity. The instruction about fine and coarse streams places the recipe in the era of the two-tap draft arm, before mechanical mixers and pre-mixed carbonated dispensing took over.