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Cuban Delight
Prepare syrup of 3 lemons, 3 oranges, 1 pound granulated sugar, 4 ounces strawberry juice, 1 ounce solution citric acid, sufficient carmine solution and water, and enough syrup to make 1 gallon. Grate the yellow potion of the peel from the lemons and oranges, triturate with sugar, add the juice and enough water to make a solution; strain, and add the coloring and the syrup. Careless clerks should not be employed at the soda fountain. Absolute neatness in dress should be insisted upon.
A fountain syrup formula, written for someone who already has a barrel of plain simple syrup on hand and needs a gallon of flavoring stock. The whole thing hinges on getting the citrus oil out of the zest and into the sugar before any water touches it.
- TrituratePharmacy language for grinding zest and sugar together, originally with a mortar and pestle. The sugar crystals tear the oil cells open; a food processor or twenty seconds of rubbing the zest into the sugar with your fingertips does the same work. Skip it and you lose most of the aroma.
- "Enough syrup to make 1 gallon"This means plain simple syrup, the fountain's base stock, not more of the flavoring you are making. Fountain simple syrups were generally heavy, sugar-dominant solutions, though this book gives no strength. The pound of granulated sugar in the citrus infusion is separate from that.
- Solution of citric acidOne ounce of a solution, not one ounce of crystals, and the book never states the strength; period formulas for citric acid solution varied. Treat the quantity as approximate and add acid gradually to taste; the juice of the three lemons is already contributing a good deal.
- Carmine solutionCochineal extract, the standard red for fountain work and still sold as a food color. Here it simply supplies the red colour the formula calls for. Any red food coloring, or a splash more strawberry juice, serves the same purpose.
- The yellow portion of the peelZest only, no white pith, from both the lemons and the oranges. Pith carries bitter compounds that show up sharply in a sweet syrup and get worse after a few days in the bottle.
- Strawberry juiceFour ounces of strained juice, not preserve or crushed fruit. Press ripe berries and strain through a fine sieve; commercial strawberry puree works if you thin it and strain out seeds, which otherwise clog a pump or a bottle spout.
- Yield and servingOne gallon of syrup, or roughly 85 to 128 servings at a pour of an ounce to an ounce and a half in a glass topped with cold carbonated water. Keep it refrigerated; with fruit juice in it this will not hold at room temperature the way a plain syrup does.
- The last two sentencesNot part of the method. Books of this kind mixed shop-management advice in with the formulas.
Fountain syrups named for places did not usually come from them; "Cuban" here likely signals tropical citrus and sweetness at a period when Cuba figured prominently in American newspapers and in the American sugar trade. The formula's vocabulary is that of the pharmacy -- trituration, acid solutions, carmine -- reflecting the fact that soda fountains of this period commonly sat at the front of the drugstore and the man mixing drinks might also be the man compounding prescriptions. Citric acid supplied tartness that carbonated water otherwise dilutes away, and coloring was treated as part of the formula alongside the fruit. The abrupt closing lines about careless clerks and neatness of dress suggest the trade's concern with the respectability of its counter staff.