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Crushed Fruit Syrup (Take a small quantity of each)
Take a small quantity of each fruit in season. Cut very fine, place in a dish, add enough sugar to cover it, and let it stand five hours before using. Ice Cream, 1 large teaspoonful; Mixed Fruits, 2 tablespoonfuls. Soda Water to fill tumbler.
Serve with a spoon and in a 14-ounce tumbler.
This is a soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: the first three sentences make a crushed-fruit preserve, the rest is the dispensing order for a single glass. Read it as two operations.
- The hinge: sugar by weight, not by sightThe hinge: sugar by sight, not by weight -- "enough sugar to cover" finely cut soft fruit is a generous amount, probably approaching the weight of the fruit itself, though the recipe gives no figure. The sugar is what draws the juice out; skimping on it gives you watery fruit that spoils faster.
- Five hours standingThe recipe gives no temperature. Do it covered in the refrigerator and give it overnight; the syrup draws a little more slowly but the fruit will not pick up yeast from the air.
- Keeping the crushed fruitThere is no cooking and no canning step here, so this is a fresh product. Treat it like a refrigerator jam and use it within about a week, discarding it at the first smell of alcohol or fizz.
- "Fruit in season"The recipe leaves the mix open; soft summer fruit such as strawberry, raspberry, peach or cherry is the obvious reading.
- Soda waterA fountain delivered carbonated water under real pressure, which is what mixed the syrup and raised the head. Chilled seltzer from a siphon or a fresh bottle poured hard down the side of the glass is the nearest equivalent; flat club soda will leave the fruit sitting on the bottom.
- The measuresA 14-ounce tumbler is a tall soda glass, a little under two cups. "1 large teaspoonful" of ice cream means a rounded spoon rather than a scoop, and the two tablespoons of fruit go in with it before the water.
- YieldThe dispensing half of the recipe makes one drink. A pint of prepared crushed fruit is about sixteen glasses at two tablespoons each.
The American soda fountain of the late nineteenth century served "crushed fruit" — fruit macerated in sugar and served with the pulp still in it, spooned as much as sipped, which fits the instruction here for a spoon and a tall tumbler. Fountains were still largely attached to drugstores, and the dispenser worked from formula books: a list of components, a quantity for each, and the order of assembly. The style faded along with the soda fountain itself over the twentieth century.