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Chocolate Syrup (Dissolve the contents of I)
Dissolve the contents of I package American Chocolate Paste in 5 pints of hot water with 5 pounds of sugar, and strain while hot through flannel or very fine sieve. Pour a little cream into the cup, add 1 ounce chocolate syrup, nearly fill with hot water from the draft tube, and stir with a spoon. Add a teaspoonful of whipped cream.
Two recipes in one: a bulk fountain syrup, then the hot chocolate built from it a cup at a time. The proportions assume a commercial soda fountain, so scaling down is the first job.
- American Chocolate PasteA proprietary trade product sold to soda fountains: ground cocoa or chocolate worked into a smooth paste. The recipe gives no package weight and no indication of what else was in it. It has no modern equivalent on the shelf; unsweetened cocoa powder, whisked to a slurry before it meets the hot water, is the closest stand-in.
- YieldFive pints of water and five pounds of sugar dissolve down to roughly a gallon of finished syrup. At one ounce per cup that is around 128 servings. Divide by eight for a useful home batch: about 10 oz water and 10 oz sugar. The cocoa has to be judged by eye, since the weight of the original package is unknown.
- The strain mattersCocoa solids will not fully dissolve, and the flannel bag catches the grit that would otherwise settle in the bottom of the syrup jar and clog a pump. A double layer of butter muslin does the same work. Strain while it is genuinely hot or the syrup thickens and refuses to pass.
- Sugar concentration and keepingThis works out near 49 percent sugar by weight, well short of the 65 percent or so that makes a syrup self-preserving. Refrigerate it and use it within two weeks.
- "Hot water from the draft tube"The fountain's hot-water tap, drawing from a heated urn, delivered water very hot. A kettle does the same. Note that this is a hot chocolate made with water, not milk; the small pour of cream at the bottom of the cup is what enriches it.
- MeasuresOne ounce of syrup is two tablespoons. "A little cream" is left undefined in the original.
- Cup sizeFountain cups for hot drinks were generally small. In a modern twelve-ounce mug the single ounce of syrup will taste thin; double it.
The American drug-store soda fountain was a summer business, and hot soda was the trade's answer to the dead months between October and April. Hot chocolate, hot beef tea, hot clam bouillon and hot lemonade were all drawn from the same urn and the same syrup pumps, which is why this recipe reads as a manufacturing instruction followed by a service instruction. The reliance on a branded chocolate paste is characteristic of the period, when fountain supply houses sold pastes, fruit crushes, extracts and "foam" preparations to operators who had neither the equipment nor the inclination to grind cocoa themselves. Some recipe books of this sort were published or subsidised by those same supply houses, though nothing here establishes that for this one.<br><br>The flannel strainer is older than the fountain by a long way; jelly bags and hippocras sleeves worked the same way, and it survived into commercial syrup-making because nothing cheaper produced a clear pour.</br></br>