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Chocolate Syrup
American Concentrated Chocolate Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 3 quarts. Mix well.
This is a fountain dilution formula rather than a cooking recipe: it takes a commercial concentrate and cuts it with sugar syrup to dispensing strength. Almost everything you need to know is hidden in the phrase "plain syrup."
- Plain syrupIn fountain usage this means simple syrup at soda-fountain density, generally much heavier than a modern 1:1 syrup: something on the order of 2 parts granulated sugar to 1 part water by weight. Some manuals dissolved it cold, others with gentle heat; the recipe itself gives no method. A modern 1:1 simple syrup is much thinner and will give a watery, weakly sweet result at the standard pour.
- The concentrate"American Concentrated Chocolate Syrup" reads as a named concentrate rather than something compounded here, though whether it was a bought trade product or a formula given elsewhere in the same book cannot be told from this line. Any thick unsweetened-leaning chocolate concentrate can stand in, but taste before you commit to the 1:3 ratio, since modern syrups are already sweetened and diluting them four-fold will flatten the chocolate.
- Ratio, not quantityRead it as 1 part concentrate to 3 parts plain syrup. The quart-and-three-quarts scale makes a full gallon, which suited a fountain turning over syrup daily and is far more than a household needs.
- Mix wellThe instruction is doing real work. Cocoa solids and a dense sugar syrup separate readily, so stir until fully homogeneous and stir again before each use; unmixed syrup draws pale at the start of the jar and cloyingly dark at the bottom.
- How it was servedA common fountain pour was about 1 to 1.5 fl oz of finished syrup into a glass, then carbonated water, typically a coarse stream followed by a fine one. A gallon of this therefore yields roughly 85 to 128 drinks depending on the pour.
- KeepingThe high sugar concentration also works against spoilage. Cut with a thinner modern syrup, it should be refrigerated and treated as perishable within a couple of weeks.
Soda-fountain manuals of this kind were written for the dispenser behind the marble counter, not the home cook, and formulas like this one show how far the trade had already industrialised: the flavour arrived in a labelled jug and the fountain man's job was to cut it correctly, keep it clean and pour it consistently. Chocolate is often said to have been one of the anchor flavours of the American fountain, useful because it worked as a plain soda, as the base of a chocolate ice-cream soda, and stirred into milk. The heavy "plain syrup" that such a book assumes on hand was the workhorse of the whole enterprise, made in large batches and used to sweeten and thicken every flavour on the rail, and its density mattered for the same reason it mattered in preserving: sugar at that concentration keeps.