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Chocolate Syrup (II)
American Double Vanilla Chocolate Paste (1 pkg.), 1 lb.; Simple Syrup (hot), 1 gallon. Mix thoroughly, and strain while hot through flannel or fine sieve.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen one: it assumes a proprietary chocolate paste bought by the pound from a supply house, and a barrel of simple syrup already on hand. Both need translating.
- The chocolate paste is gone"American Double Vanilla Chocolate Paste" was a trade product, a sweetened cocoa preparation flavoured with vanilla and sold to dispensers in one-pound packages; the exact make-up is not recorded here. Nothing on a supermarket shelf corresponds to it. A workable substitute is a paste made from about 8 oz Dutch-process cocoa, 8 oz sugar and enough hot water to slake it smooth, with a tablespoon of vanilla extract stirred in off the heat.
- What fountain simple syrup meantNot the 1:1 bar syrup of today. Fountain syrup was heavy, dissolving something in the region of 6 to 7 lb of sugar per gallon of finished syrup, i.e. well over one part sugar to one of water by weight. Using a thin 1:1 syrup here gives a chocolate that tastes flat and will not keep as well.
- Proportions are light by modern tasteOne pound of paste to a full gallon of syrup produces a mild, sweet chocolate meant to be shot into a glass and lengthened with carbonated water. Scaled down for home use — say 2 oz cocoa paste to a pint of syrup — it will read as thin over ice cream. Increase the cocoa if it is going on a sundae rather than into a soda.
- Mix hot, and mean itCocoa solids will not disperse in cold syrup; they clump and then settle. The syrup should be at or near a boil when the paste goes in, and whisked hard until no dark specks remain on the side of the pan.
- Straining through flannelA flannel bag was the standard fountain filter. Two layers of damp cheesecloth in a sieve, or a fine chinois, do the same job. Strain while the syrup is hot or it will not pass; the point is to catch undissolved cocoa grit that would otherwise sit in the bottom of the bottle.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative here beyond sugar. At full fountain strength it keeps some weeks refrigerated; at any lower sugar concentration treat it as a fresh syrup and use it within a week or two. Discard at the first sign of surface mould or a fermented smell.
- YieldSlightly over a gallon. At roughly an ounce of syrup to the glass that is something like 120 to 130 servings of chocolate soda. Quarter or eighth the batch for a household.
Books like this one were written for the man behind the marble counter, not the cook, and it shows in the shorthand: a named proprietary paste, a bulk syrup taken for granted, a yield measured in gallons. The American soda fountain reached its height in the decades on either side of 1900, when it occupied the front of the drugstore and the dispenser was expected to compound his own syrups from supply-house concentrates the way a pharmacist compounded prescriptions. Chocolate was the workhorse flavour, and this book carries more than one formula for it — the recipe here is numbered "(II)" — because each fountain wanted a house version. The instruction to strain through flannel reflects a practice standard in confectionery and syrup work generally, and the reliance on a branded paste might be read as a sign that the trade was shifting from making flavourings to buying them in.