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Coffee Syrup (II)
American Condensed Coffee, 4 ounces; American Sarsaparilla Color, 1 ounce; Simple Syrup, 1 gallon.
This is a fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: three things stirred together in a jug, with all the flavor riding on a proprietary concentrate. What matters is understanding what those trade goods were and how the finished syrup was meant to be served.
- The hinge is the concentrate"American Condensed Coffee" was a proprietary coffee extract sold to the fountain trade, and its strength would have varied from house to house; the formula tells us nothing about whether it was sweetened. Four ounces in a gallon of syrup is a very light hand by modern taste; start with a strong cold-brew or espresso concentrate and expect to use several times that volume, tasting as you go.
- Sarsaparilla color is caramel colorFountain "colors" were caramel-based tinting solutions with little flavor of their own, used to deepen a pale syrup to the expected coffee brown. It is cosmetic only and can be left out entirely.
- Simple syrup meant heavy syrupAt the fountain, simple syrup was far heavier than the 1:1 syrup of a modern bar, on the order of two parts sugar to one part water by weight. Substituting 1:1 will give a thinner, less sweet drink at the dispensing ratios below.
- A gallon is 128 fluid ouncesTo scale down, one quart of syrup takes 1 ounce of coffee concentrate and about 1/4 ounce of color. The ounces are most likely fluid measure, both additions being liquids, though the formula does not say so.
- How it was servedDraw 1 to 1 1/2 ounces of syrup into the glass, then fill with carbonated water for a coffee soda, or with cold milk for coffee milk. At that pour a gallon yields roughly 85 to 128 drinks.
- Keeping itHeavy sugar syrup resists spoilage for weeks refrigerated, but coffee aromatics fade within days. Mix in quart batches rather than gallons unless you are actually running a counter.
Formula books like this one were working manuals for the soda fountain, a fixture of American drugstores from the 1880s through the mid-twentieth century, where the dispenser kept a rack of syrups and built drinks to order. Coffee syrup was a minor member of that rack next to vanilla, chocolate and the sarsaparillas, and it survives most visibly in Rhode Island, where bottled coffee syrup stirred into cold milk became the state's characteristic drink; the local brands are generally traced to Italian-American shops and dairies in the early decades of the century. The recipe's reliance on named proprietary goods, "American Condensed Coffee" and "American Sarsaparilla Color," is typical of the genre: the fountain trade ran on jobbers' catalogs, and a formula was often little more than instructions for diluting what the supply house had already made.