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Crushed Rose Syrup
Triple extract of rose (perfume), 12 drams; soda foam, 1 ounce; rose or red color, q. s.; simple syrup, q. s. to make one gallon.
A soda fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: a gallon batch of flavoring syrup to be drawn against carbonated water. Two of its four ingredients are the problem, and neither can be safely substituted by guesswork.
- Perfume-grade extract is not a food ingredientThe original flags the triple extract of rose as a perfumery article. Perfume compounds were built to smell right rather than to be swallowed, and there is no way to know what carrier or additives a given one contained. Nothing labelled as perfume should go into a drink.
- "Soda foam" at an ounce per gallonFountain foams of this period were generally saponin extracts, most often from quillaia (soapbark). Saponins are haemolytic in quantity, which is why quillaia is permitted in beverages today only at tightly limited levels. A blanket ounce per gallon of an unspecified proprietary preparation is not a measured dose.
- The coloringThe formula asks only for "rose or red color" in whatever quantity suffices, and never says which colorant. Reds available to a druggist in this era ranged from coal-tar dyes later withdrawn from food use to cochineal or carmine. There is no way to know which is meant.
- Reading the units anywayA fluid dram is one eighth of a fluid ounce, so 12 drams is an ounce and a half. Q. s. is quantum sufficit, as much as suffices, here meaning simple syrup to bring the whole to one gallon.
- If you want a rose sodaUse a current recipe built on a culinary rose water or a food-grade rose flavoring, from a source that states it is for food use.
Flavoring formulas like this one belong to the age of the drugstore soda fountain, when the same counter dispensed prescriptions and beverages and the dispenser compounded his own syrups by the gallon from the pharmacy's own stock of extracts, colors and gums. Floral sodas — rose, violet, orange flower — were a fashionable strand of the trade around the turn of the twentieth century, marketed as delicate alternatives to the fruit and cola syrups, and they drew on a much older tradition of rose-scented sherbets and cordials from Persia, the Ottoman lands and India, which had reached European confectionery centuries earlier. The instruction to buy the flavor as perfume is a reminder of how porous the line then was between the drug counter, the cosmetics case and the fountain: all three drew on the same shelf of extracts, and food purity law was only beginning to catch up, in the United States with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.