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Currant Syrup (American Currant Juice quart)
American Currant Juice, 1 quart.
Add enough simple syrup to make 11/½ gallons, 1 ounce American Fruit Acid, and ¾ ounce American Soda Foam. If 10-pound syrup is used, add 2 pounds sugar, and dissolve in the juice by stirring, or by slight heat, but avoid boiling.
A soda fountain formula, written for a dispenser who bought his flavour bases by the gallon from a supply house. It scales down cleanly once you know what the trade names stand for.
- The quantity is 1½ gallons"11/½ gallons" is a typesetting artifact for 1½ gallons. One quart of currant juice topped up with simple syrup to 192 fl oz gives roughly a 1:5 dilution of juice to syrup.
- "10-pound syrup"Fountain syrups were reckoned by sugar density, a 10-pound syrup carrying about 10 lb of sugar to the gallon. That is evidently lighter than the stock syrup this formula otherwise assumes, which is why 2 lb of sugar is called for. A higher sugar density also helps a counter syrup resist fermentation and mould.
- American Fruit AcidA proprietary acidulant, in practice a solution of citric or tartaric acid, sometimes both. An ounce in a gallon and a half is a light hand; modern practice is to add citric acid to taste, starting well under a teaspoon per quart, since currant juice already carries considerable acid of its own.
- American Soda FoamA foaming agent, almost always an extract of quillaia (soapbark) or occasionally saponin from other sources. It exists solely to make the drawn glass hold a head. It is optional; leave it out and you have a perfectly good currant syrup that simply looks flatter.
- Do not boilThe instruction to dissolve the sugar cold, or with only slight heat, is the hinge of the recipe. Boiling currant juice drives off the fresh top notes and dulls the colour from bright red toward brown, which in a fountain syrup is the whole point of the product.
- Currant juicePresumably red currant juice rather than blackcurrant, though the recipe does not specify; and not the dried "currants" of baking, which are grapes. Fresh red currants are seasonal and scarce in American markets; bottled unsweetened red currant juice or nectar sold for European baking is the practical substitute.
- KeepingAt full fountain density the syrup keeps for weeks refrigerated. If you reduce the sugar to modern taste, it becomes a perishable cordial and should be treated as one.
- Yield and serviceA gallon and a half of syrup at the usual 1 to 1½ fl oz per glass runs to roughly 130 to 190 drinks. For one glass, pour the syrup over ice and fill with soda water.
The soda fountain of the 1890s and 1900s ran on a system of standardised stock syrups, and books like this were written for the dispenser rather than the cook: buy the juice, the acid and the foam from a supply house, cut them with simple syrup, and you have a saleable flavour. The repeated "American" may well be a brand line, the supplier's own range of fountain materials, rather than a claim about the fruit's origin, though nothing in the text settles the point. Red currants themselves were far more familiar in American kitchens then than now, grown widely in home gardens for jelly and shrub until white pine blister rust led several states to restrict Ribes plantings in the early twentieth century, restrictions often credited with the fruit's later retreat from American tables. Fruit acid and soda foam were among the common fountain additives of the period: the first restored the tartness lost in heavy sugar, the second gave the drawn glass the head that customers had come to expect.