Home › At the Fountain › Currant Syrup
Currant Syrup
American Concentrated Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 2 quarts; Fruit Acid, 1 ounce.
This is a fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: three components blended cold, in the proportions a dispenser would scale up by the gallon. The only real work is knowing what the trade names meant.
- American Concentrated SyrupApparently a bought-in concentrated flavoring base of the kind supply houses sold to fountains, meant to be cut with plain syrup; the book gives no composition. The nearest modern stand-in is a commercial currant syrup concentrate or a strong reduction of red currant juice with sugar; there is no exact equivalent, and the strength would have varied by maker.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain" or "simple" syrup of this period was much heavier than a modern 1:1 sugar syrup, made close to saturation, so that it would keep without spoiling and stand up to dilution by charged water. A thin syrup here will give a watery, quick-souring result.
- Fruit acidNot a fruit product but an acid solution, usually citric or tartaric acid dissolved in water; the strength varied from book to book. Whether the ounce called for is the dry acid or the prepared solution is genuinely ambiguous in books of this kind; add it a little at a time and taste.
- VolumesOne quart plus two quarts gives three quarts of finished syrup, about 96 fluid ounces.
- Serving proportionThe fountain standard was about 1 to 1.5 fluid ounces of syrup drawn into a glass and filled with carbonated water, which makes this batch roughly 65 to 95 drinks. Scale it down by a factor of eight for a household quantity.
- Mixing and keepingThe formula gives no method and calls for no heat; the three components can simply be stirred together cold. Bottle full, cap tight, and keep cool and dark; the high sugar content is what chiefly preserves it, so a reduced-sugar version needs refrigeration and short use.
Soda fountain manuals like this one are essentially trade handbooks: the dispenser bought flavoring concentrates from a supply house and his job was to cut, acidify and hold them correctly, which is why the "recipe" is three lines of proportions and no method. Fruit acid appears in nearly every fruit formula in such books because carbonated water alone tastes flat against sugar; the tartness that made a currant or raspberry syrup read as fruit came largely from added citric or tartaric acid rather than the fruit itself. Currants — red and black Ribes — were a common European garden and market fruit and were widely grown in the northeastern United States in the nineteenth century, though cultivation there fell away in the early twentieth as Ribes plantings were restricted on account of white pine blister rust, which is generally credited with driving the fruit out of the American commercial repertoire. That decline is part of why currant, once a standard fountain flavor alongside lemon and raspberry, is now an unfamiliar one in the United States while remaining ordinary in Britain and northern Europe.