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Crushed Fruit Syrup (Mix one part of fruit with two)
Mix one part of fruit with two parts heavy, simple syrup, and dispense from bowl on counter. Use a ladle to serve the fruit.
A fountain formula rather than a domestic recipe: it assumes you know what "heavy simple syrup" means and that the bowl will be emptied within a day's trade. Two details need translating.
- Heavy simple syrupAt the fountain this meant roughly two parts sugar to one part water by weight, heated only until the sugar dissolved and then cooled — around 65 percent sugar, thick enough to coat the ladle. A 1:1 syrup is too thin here; the fruit will float and the juice will thin it further.
- "One part fruit"Most likely measured by volume, and the fruit is crushed rather than pureed — strawberries, raspberries, sliced peaches or pineapple broken up with a masher or the back of a spoon so there are recognisable pieces for the ladle to catch. Frozen fruit works, thawed and drained of its loose juice first.
- Macerate before servingMix and let it stand an hour or two. The syrup draws juice from the fruit and the two come into balance; used immediately the fruit tastes raw against the sugar.
- The bowl on the counterPractical in a shop that sold out daily. In a home kitchen keep it covered in the refrigerator and use it within about a week, and discard it at any sign of fermentation — the sugar slows spoilage but does not stop it, and diluted juice on the surface is fair game for yeast.
- Yield and useAbout 1 1/2 cups of fruit to 3 cups of syrup gives a little over a quart. Figure 1 1/2 to 2 ounces per glass, topped with soda water for a crushed-fruit soda, or ladled straight over ice cream as a sundae topping.
- Adjust for the fruitRipe strawberries and pineapple carry enough acid to stand up to this much sugar; peaches and bananas do not. A squeeze of lemon juice per cup of finished syrup restores the edge.
Crushed fruit was a fountain staple in the decades either side of 1900, when a soda dispenser's stock in trade was a rank of syrup pumps plus a few open bowls of fruit held in heavy syrup, ladled over ice cream or into a glass before the carbonated water went in. The heavy syrup may well have served preservation as much as flavour, though that is inference rather than something the sources state: fruit kept in such a syrup would last without ice for the length of a business day, which mattered in shops where mechanical refrigeration was still an expensive novelty and the ice was reserved for chilling the drinks. Trade manuals of the period were written for the apprentice behind the counter, and this one gives proportions rather than recipes — dispense from a bowl, use a ladle — on the assumption that the reader already had the syrup kettle going.