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Crab-apple Tonic
Evaporate 1 gallon of sweet cider to ½ gallon with the aid of heat, and dissolve in this 7 pounds granulated sugar; add 4 ounces extract of malt and 6 drams citric acid. The above makes a perfect patented syrups, such as champagne mist and kylo.
A fountain syrup, not a finished drink: the product is a concentrated apple-malt base meant to be drawn by the ounce and topped with carbonated water. The whole character of it rests on reducing the cider slowly enough that it caramelizes rather than scorches.
- Sweet cider means unfermentedIn American usage of this period "sweet cider" is fresh, unfermented apple juice, as opposed to hard cider. Unfiltered cloudy juice gives the fuller flavor the reduction depends on; clear filtered apple juice will work but tastes thinner.
- The reduction is the whole recipeOne gallon down to half a gallon is a 50 percent reduction, and it wants a wide pan and moderate heat. Once the volume drops the sugars concentrate fast and will catch on the bottom, so stir and pull it off the moment it hits the half-gallon mark.
- DramsSix drams of citric acid, in a druggist's formula, means the apothecaries' dram of one-eighth of an ounce: about three-quarters of an ounce, roughly 23 g, or about two tablespoons of the granular powder. It is a weight, not the fluid dram.
- Extract of maltFour ounces of extract of malt, the thick brown syrup sold for brewing and baking and, in this period, over the drugstore counter as well. It is here for body and a faintly toasty depth rather than for sweetness.
- Dissolve, do not boil againAdd the seven pounds of sugar to the hot reduced cider off direct heat and stir until fully dissolved, then stir in the malt and the acid. Adding citric acid to boiling syrup drives off aroma and can invert more sugar than you want.
- Yield and dilutionYou will end with roughly a gallon of finished syrup. Fountain practice was about 1 to 1.5 fluid ounces of syrup in a glass filled with carbonated water; taste and adjust, since this one is acid-forward.
- Keeping itAt this sugar concentration the syrup is fairly self-preserving, but the cider solids will grow mold at the surface if left in a warm open jar. Bottle it hot into clean bottles, cap, and refrigerate once opened.
- "Crab-apple" is a flavor claimNo crab apples appear in the formula. The name describes the intended tart-apple profile, which comes from the reduced cider plus the citric acid.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one occupied an odd commercial niche: they sold dispensers the formulas for imitating branded, so-called patented syrups that arrived from wholesalers at a markup. "Champagne mist" and "kylo" appear in the recipe's own phrasing as proprietary fountain flavors of the era, and the frank promise here is that a druggist can make the same thing from cider, sugar, malt extract and citric acid. The word "tonic" is doing period work as well; malt extract was widely sold in drugstores as a strengthening and digestive preparation, so a syrup containing it could be presented as mildly medicinal rather than merely sweet, which suited a trade in which the soda counter and the prescription counter stood in the same room. Crab and cider apples were also genuinely abundant in American orchards, and boiling cider down to a concentrate was old farm practice long before it was a fountain formula.