Home › At the Fountain › Chocolate Syrup (One pound American Powdered) (II)
Chocolate Syrup (One pound American Powdered) (II)
One pound American Powdered Cocoa, 1 gallon warm simple syrup, 2 fluid drams extract of vanilla. Mix thoroughly.
A fountain formula rather than a home one: it makes a gallon of chocolate syrup meant to be drawn an ounce or two at a time into a glass of soda water. Scale it down before you commit a whole pound of cocoa.
- The dramsA fluid dram is 1/8 fluid ounce, about 3.7 ml. Two of them come to roughly 1.5 teaspoons of vanilla extract for the full gallon — a light hand by modern standards.
- Scaling to a quartOne quarter of the batch is 4 oz cocoa by weight (about 1 1/3 cups, since cocoa is bulky and light), 1 quart of simple syrup, and a scant 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.
- "American Powdered Cocoa"This means natural, non-alkalized cocoa — acidic, reddish-brown, sharper in flavour than Dutch-process. Dutch cocoa will work but gives a darker, flatter, less tangy syrup.
- Fountain simple syrup is heavySoda-fountain syrup of the period ran near saturation, on the order of 6 to 7 lb of sugar per gallon of water, not the 1:1 bar syrup most people make now. Use a heavy syrup or the finished product will taste thin and watery once diluted with soda.
- "Mix thoroughly" is the whole recipeDry cocoa dumped into syrup will clump and float. Make a smooth paste with a little of the warm syrup first, then work in the rest; the syrup must be warm, not hot, or the vanilla flashes off.
- It will separateCocoa solids are suspended, not dissolved, and they settle within hours. A pinch of salt sharpens the flavour, and the bottle will want stirring or shaking before each pour. Some versions of this formula are cooked rather than merely mixed, which may help the starch in the cocoa hold the solids up.
- KeepingThere is no preservative here beyond the sugar. Refrigerate a home batch and use it within about two weeks.
- ServingFigure 1 to 1.5 fl oz of syrup per 8 oz glass, topped with cold soda water, or stirred into milk. A gallon (128 fl oz) runs to roughly 85 to 128 drinks.
Chocolate was the workhorse flavour of the American soda fountain, and manuals of this sort print variants of the same idea — cocoa, sugar syrup, vanilla — differing mainly in the grade of cocoa and whether the mixture is cooked. The recipe depends on a nineteenth-century industrial development: the hydraulic press that squeezed most of the cocoa butter out of ground beans and left a defatted cake that could be milled into free-flowing powder, generally traced to Coenraad van Houten in the Netherlands in the 1820s. Before that, chocolate came as a fatty mass that refused to blend into a cold sweetened drink. "American" powder here distinguishes the plain, unalkalized domestic product from the Dutch-process cocoa treated with alkali. That the book gives a one-pound and other sizes of the same formula says what it was for: a druggist or fountain man mixing to the size of his crock, not a cook making dessert.