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Fourth of July Fizz
Make a syrup of 4 ounces grape jelly, 4 ounces hot water, 1 dram fluid extract of kola, 1 dram vanilla extract, 2 drops acetic ether, 2 drops oenanthic ether, and enough syrup to make the whole mixture amount to 32 ounces. Serve like phosphate.
A soda-fountain bottling formula rather than a drink: it yields a quart of flavoring syrup to be drawn an ounce at a time. Two of its seven ingredients are no longer sold in any form a cook should put in a glass, and the recipe cannot be followed today.
- Acetic etherThis is ethyl acetate, once carried in dram bottles behind the prescription counter. Ethyl acetate is still used as a food-grade flavouring, but what is readily bought now is reagent- or industrial-grade solvent — the base of nail polish remover — sold with no purity guarantee for ingestion. Two drops of an unspecified grade into a quart of syrup is not a dose anyone can vouch for.
- Oenanthic etherAn old pharmacy "wine ether," a mixture of fatty-acid ethyl esters intended to suggest a vinous bouquet. The compounded article itself is no longer sold as a food ingredient; the related esters survive as food-grade flavour compounds, but anything offered under a translated version of the old name today is likely a laboratory chemical.
- Fluid extract of kolaA caffeinated tincture of kola nut, at USP strength roughly one part drug to one part finished extract — far more concentrated than a modern flavoring. Present-day kola preparations are not standardized to the old fluid-extract scale, so the dram called for here has no reliable equivalent.
- What a dram isA fluid dram is one eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.7 mL, or roughly three quarters of a teaspoon. Fountain formulas leaned on the apothecary scale because the syrups were compounded by druggists, not cooks.
- "Enough syrup"Plain fountain syrup — cane sugar dissolved to about 65 percent, near saturation — used as the bulk and the preservative. The instruction is to top up to a total of 32 ounces, so the finished quart is mostly sugar syrup carrying a very small flavor load.
- "Serve like phosphate"At the fountain that meant about an ounce of syrup in the glass, a dash of acid phosphate for tartness, then carbonated water drawn under pressure and stirred. A quart of syrup made roughly thirty drinks.
- If you want the drinkUse a current grape soda syrup recipe built on juice, sugar and food-grade flavoring. The ethers called for here should not be reproduced with reagent- or industrial-grade material.
Fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were written for pharmacists, which is why this reads like a prescription: apothecary drams, fluid extracts, and a pair of ethers ordered from the same wholesaler that supplied the dispensary. Compounded esters were the cheap route to fruit flavor before reliable juice concentrates, and "acetic ether" and "oenanthic ether" turn up constantly in the period's grape, wine and champagne syrups — oenanthic ether was valued precisely because it was said to carry the vinous top note that jelly alone could not. Kola extract belonged to the same drugstore logic, sold as a nerve tonic and stimulant and folded into soda syrups on both counts. The patriotic name looks like pure fountain marketing: operators are often said to have renamed a house grape syrup for whatever holiday was coming, and a red-purple fizz served over the Fourth needed no further justification.