Home › At the Fountain › Florida Fruit
Florida Fruit
One dram vanilla extract, 1 dram orange essence, 1 dram lemon essence, 1 ounce pineapple juice, 1 ounce strawberry juice, sufficient soda foam, and syrup enough to make 32 ounces. Color with tincture of cudbear, and serve like any other syrup in a 12-ounce glass.
This is a fountain syrup formula, written in a druggist's measures, not a finished drink: you build a quart of flavored syrup and then draw individual glasses from it with carbonated water. Two things need attention before you start — the colorant and the foam.
- Skip the cudbearTincture of cudbear is an alcoholic extract of a lichen dye, once a common pharmacy stock item and not approved as a food colour under modern US or EU rules. Leave it out or use a few drops of ordinary red food coloring; it contributes nothing but the pinkish tint.
- A dram is a fluid dramThat is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly 3.7 ml, or a scant three-quarters of a teaspoon. Three drams of flavoring in a full quart of syrup is a light hand, which is the point.
- Essence is not extractEssence and extract were not always the same thing -- Nineteenth-century orange and lemon "essences" were commonly citrus oils cut with alcohol, and can be stronger than modern supermarket extracts. Start with the stated amount, taste the finished syrup, and add in quarter-teaspoons rather than doubling blind.
- Syrup means fountain syrupThe recipe does not say, but fountain syrups of the period were heavy, on the order of two parts sugar to one of water by weight, cooked just enough to dissolve. Anything thinner will not stand up to dilution in the glass.
- Soda foamFountain "foam" was a foaming agent — usually a quillaia (soap bark) solution or a whipped egg-albumen preparation — added so the drink built a head. It is optional; a small quantity of aquafaba or pasteurized egg white whisked in gives the same effect, and the drink is perfectly good without it.
- The fruit juicesUse strained fresh pineapple and strawberry juice, pressed and filtered clear, or the syrup will cloud and separate. Fresh pineapple carries bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme that will break down any egg-white foam preparation, so scald the juice briefly or plan on using the batch within a week under refrigeration.
- Yield and serviceThe formula makes 32 ounces of syrup. Draw about 1 to 1½ ounces into a 12-ounce glass, fill with cold carbonated water with the stream directed at the syrup to mix it, and stir once — roughly 20 to 30 drinks per quart.
Soda fountain manuals of this period read like prescription books because the fountain lived in the drugstore, and the man behind it was a pharmacist working in drams, ounces and tinctures. "Florida Fruit" is a marketing name rather than a regional formula: by the 1880s and 1890s rail cars were carrying Florida oranges north in quantity, and the state's name on a soda syrup promised sunshine and fresh fruit to customers in Boston or Chicago in February. The tincture of cudbear called for here is a good marker of the era's compounding habits: cudbear is a red-purple dye made by treating lichens with ammonia, a Scottish trade product generally traced to the eighteenth-century textile industry, and it passed easily from the dyer's vat to the apothecary's shelf to the fruit syrup because a fountain drink was expected to look as vivid as it tasted.