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Fruit Nectar
One quart each of American Vanilla, Orangeade and Strawberry Syrup. Add three ounces of port wine and mix thoroughly. Serve in a soda glass with cream. There is as much difference between the soda of different stores as between the roast beef of different restaurants.
This is a fountain formula, not a single drink: it makes three quarts of blended syrup to be kept in a jar or pump bottle and drawn a glassful at a time. The proportions only make sense once you read it that way.
- What the quantities produceThree quarts of finished syrup, plus 3 oz of port. At the standard fountain measure of 1 to 1½ fl oz of syrup per glass, that is roughly 64 to 96 servings. Scale down by a quarter or an eighth for home use.
- The syrups are the recipe"American Vanilla," orangeade and strawberry syrup were bottled or house-made fountain syrups, all of them sweet, heavy sugar syrups rather than the thin flavouring extracts sold today; no strength is specified here. Substituting an unsweetened vanilla or orange syrup will give a thin, sour drink.
- The port is a seasoningThree ounces in ninety-six is about 3 percent of the syrup, and each finished glass dilutes that several times over again. It is there for colour and a faint vinous depth, not for strength.
- "Serve in a soda glass with cream"The assumed steps are left out as trade knowledge: syrup into the glass, a tablespoon or two of sweet cream, a little coarse stream of carbonated water to mix, then fill with fine stream. Fountain practice of the period generally put the cream in before the water.
- Cream, not milkFountain cream was richer than milk, roughly comparable to modern light cream, though no figure is given. Heavy cream makes the drink cloying; skim milk will taste thin against the carbonation.
- Mixing and keepingBlend the syrups cold and stir until uniform, then bottle. Fruit syrups at this sugar concentration keep several weeks refrigerated, but the fresh orange and strawberry notes fade well before that, so mix what you will use.
- CarbonationA soda siphon or a countertop carbonator gives the sharp, fine-bubbled water the drink depends on. Bottled sparkling water is flatter and will leave the glass tasting merely sweet.
The American soda fountain of the 1890s and 1900s was a druggist's business before it was a confectioner's, and books like this one were trade manuals: formula collections sold to the man behind the marble counter, who was expected to compound his own syrups and invent house specialties. "Nectar" appears as a fountain name for a blended multi-syrup drink, and small doses of wine, sherry, port or claret appear throughout fountain literature of the period, used as flavouring in quantities that put a fraction of a teaspoon in a glass. Such formulas largely disappeared from fountain books after national Prohibition took effect in 1920, when even a trace of wine on the premises became a liability. The closing line about roast beef is the author speaking to his trade: the argument that a fountain's reputation rested on the quality of its syrups rather than on its fixtures.