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Coca and Calisaya
Coca Wine 4 fluid ounces Elixir Calisaya, 4; Orange Syrup, 24. "Quality rather than variety will make the reputation of the soda department of your business."
This is a dispensing formula from the era when the soda fountain sat inside the drugstore and the syrups shared a shelf with the tinctures. Two of its three components are pharmaceutical preparations that cannot lawfully or safely be reproduced today.
- Coca wine is a cocaine preparation"Coca Wine" meant fortified wine macerated with coca leaf, in the manner of Vin Mariani, and its active constituent was cocaine extracted by the alcohol. Coca leaf and cocaine are controlled substances in the United States and most other jurisdictions; there is no domestic version of this ingredient.
- Elixir Calisaya is a quinine drugCalisaya is a species of cinchona and the name of the bark grade taken from it, and the elixirs sold under the name were bitter alcoholic preparations of its alkaloids, quinine chief among them. Quinine in beverages is now capped by regulation at very low levels, and an uncontrolled dose from a bark tincture can cause cinchonism -- tinnitus, visual disturbance, and in serious cases blood disorders.
- No dose control anywhere in the formulaThe strengths of the two medicated components are never stated, so even setting the legality aside there is no way to know how much alkaloid a glass delivers.
- Orange syrupThe only innocuous element here: a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with sweet orange peel oil and often a little citric acid. It is doing the work of masking the bitterness of the cinchona.
- If you want the drinkThe bitter orange-and-quinine profile survives in commercially produced tonic waters and orange bitters, which are made under the current limits. Use a modern recipe built on those.
American soda fountains grew out of pharmacies, and through the 1880s and 1890s the line between a refreshment and a dose was deliberately blurred: coca preparations were sold as restoratives for fatigue and "nervous exhaustion," and calisaya elixirs as tonics and appetite stimulants for convalescents. A drink combining the two, sweetened with orange syrup and lengthened with carbonated water, let a druggist sell a stimulant and a bitter tonic in a form a customer would enjoy standing at the counter -- the same commercial logic that produced the coca-and-kola beverages of the period. Federal regulation caught up in stages, beginning with the labelling requirements of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and tightening through the narcotics legislation that followed, and formulas like this one disappeared from later editions of fountain manuals. The maxim appended at the end, about quality rather than variety, is the sort of trade advice these books scattered between recipes; they were written for the proprietor as much as for the dispenser.