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Crushed Strawberry
Select ripe strawberries, stemmed and washed, 1 quart; powdered sugar, 1½ pounds. Put in a glass bowl and stir well together. If the fruit is fully ripe, a heavy syrup will soon form on which the berries will float. In ladling out, dip the ladle into this syrup and draw up through the fruit. Half an ounce to an ounce of this syrup as a "topping" to ice cream soda is sufficient.
This is a cold-macerated crushed fruit rather than a cooked syrup, and it behaves accordingly: bright flavour, short life.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain manuals of this period "powdered sugar" means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the syrup. Use ordinary granulated or caster sugar.
- The proportionsA quart of hulled strawberries is roughly 1¼–1½ lb, so the sugar is at least equal to the fruit by weight and probably more. The heavy sugar draws out enough juice to form the syrup and helps keep the berries whole rather than mushy — but see [5]: this is not a true preserve.
- Give it time'Soon' is likely to mean hours rather than minutes. Stir, cover, and leave until the sugar has fully dissolved and a heavy syrup stands clear of the fruit.
- Why you ladle upwardThe point of dipping into the syrup and drawing up through the floating fruit is to get both in one motion — syrup for sweetness and body, whole or broken berries for texture. Stirring the bowl flat defeats it.
- The topping measureHalf an ounce to an ounce is one to two tablespoons. Over a scoop of vanilla in a soda glass that is enough; more and the carbonated water tastes only of sugar.
- KeepingThis is not preserved fruit. Refrigerate it and use within three or four days; after that the berries go dull and fermentation starts, showing as a faint fizz and a cidery smell.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A quart of berries with this much sugar will make somewhere in the region of a quart of crushed fruit and syrup, enough at the stated rate to top a good many sodas.
Crushed fruits were a distinct category at the American soda fountain, sitting between the bottled flavouring syrups the dispenser bought by the gallon and the fresh fruit he could only sell in season. Crushed strawberry, crushed pineapple and crushed cherry were among the standard preparations a fountain could make up on the premises and ladle over ice cream sodas and sundaes, the whole berries floating in the glass distinguishing them from syrup out of a jug. The technique itself is simply cold maceration, and the heavy sugar ratio is what pulls juice from the fruit without heat. Fountain manuals of this sort proliferated in the decades around 1900, when the soda fountain was a fixture of the American drugstore and dispensing was treated as a trade with its own literature.