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Cold Coca
A Thirst Quencher.
Serve same as phosphate with shaved ice. Use American Snow flake Ice Shaver; use 8-ounce tumbler. To make 1 gallon Cold Coca Syrup: Lemon Syrup, 16 ounces; Coca Wine, 8 ounces; Plain Syrup, Q. S, 1 gallon; Citric Acid (sol.), ½ ounce.
This is a soda-fountain syrup formula rather than a kitchen recipe, and one of its four ingredients is a controlled substance. The notes below explain the terms and why the formula is a historical document rather than a working one.
- Coca wine is the problem"Coca Wine" of this period was fortified wine macerated with coca leaf, and the active extract it carried was cocaine. Coca leaf and its extracts are controlled substances in the United States and most other countries outside licensed pharmaceutical use, so this cannot be made as written. How much cocaine eight ounces of a given period coca wine actually carried varied a great deal with the preparation, and diluted across a gallon of syrup the amount reaching any one glass would have been small. Anyone wanting a coca-flavoured fountain drink should work from a current recipe.
- Q. S.Quantum sufficit -- "as much as suffices." The plain syrup is not a fixed measure; it is whatever brings the finished volume up to one gallon after the other three ingredients are combined.
- Plain syrupThe fountain standard was a heavy simple syrup, commonly on the order of a pound of cane sugar per pint of water, cooked or cold-mixed. It was the neutral bulk of most of the syrups in these books.
- Citric acid (sol.)Not the dry powder but a prepared solution, typically one part crystalline citric acid dissolved in one or two parts water and kept in a stoppered bottle at the fountain. Half an ounce of solution in a gallon of syrup is a small sharpening, not a souring.
- "Serve same as phosphate"The dispenser drew an ounce or so of syrup into the tumbler, added a dash of acid phosphate, filled with carbonated water and stirred. The instruction assumes the reader already knows the house phosphate routine; nothing here is a full drink on its own.
- The shaved ice and the tumblerThe trade name suggests the American Snowflake shaver produced fine snow rather than coarse chips, which chills fast and dilutes fast. The 8-ounce tumbler is small by modern soda standards.
- YieldOne gallon of syrup at roughly an ounce per glass is something like 120 servings, which tells you this was written for a commercial counter, not a household.
Coca-leaf preparations were ordinary commerce in the American drug trade of the late nineteenth century. Coca wine reached a mass market through Vin Mariani, the Corsican chemist Angelo Mariani's coca-macerated Bordeaux, and American druggists compounded their own versions and sold them across the same counter as bitters and tonics. The soda fountain sat inside the drugstore, staffed by the same dispenser, so a syrup built on lemon, sugar, citric acid and eight ounces of an off-the-shelf medicinal wine was a routine bit of shop work rather than anything daring. Coca's reputation as a stimulant against fatigue is what puts it in a formula labelled "A Thirst Quencher" in the summer trade. The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 brought coca and its derivatives under federal control.