Home › At the Fountain › Fruit Phosphates
Fruit Phosphates
Strawberry Syrup, 8 66. 8 fluid ounces Pineapple, 8 66; Cherry, 8 66; Pear, 1 ounce.
Acid Phosphate Draw in a mineral glass with solid soda.
This is a fountain formula rather than a household recipe: a blended fruit syrup, acidulated with phosphate, dispensed by the glass with carbonated water. Two things have to be settled before you can work from it — the syrup proportions and how much of the blend goes into a glass.
- The quantities are unreliable as printedThe repeated figure attached to strawberry, pineapple and cherry is not a coherent measure, and pear is given as one ounce against them. Treat it as a blend of equal parts strawberry, pineapple and cherry syrup with a small accent of pear, and settle the ratio by taste rather than trusting the numbers.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to fountains as a souring agent that gives a dry, mineral bite quite unlike citric acid. It is still made for cocktail and soda use; a quarter to half a teaspoon per glass is the usual working dose, and the recipe gives no figure at all.
- "Solid soda"Fountain shorthand for the coarse, heavy stream from the carbonator rather than the fine spray used to build foam. In a modern kitchen it means filling with cold, hard-carbonated water poured straight down the middle so the syrup mixes without frothing over.
- Mineral glassA footed fountain glass; sizes varied, but something in the 10 to 12 ounce range is a reasonable assumption. Allowing for ice, that suggests roughly an ounce to an ounce and a half of syrup topped with soda water.
- Fountain syrups then and nowFountain and pharmacy syrups were typically heavy, often around two parts sugar to one of water by weight, flavoured with fruit juice or extract. If you use a thinner modern syrup, increase the pour or the drink will taste washed out.
- Mix the syrup aheadBlend the four syrups in bulk and keep it refrigerated; add the acid phosphate to each glass as it is drawn, as the original directs, rather than to the batch.
- YieldAs written the formula makes a syrup blend, not a single drink. At an ounce to an ounce and a half a glass, a pint of blended syrup will serve somewhere between ten and sixteen glasses depending on the pour.
Phosphates were the working soda fountain's alternative to the lemon-and-citric-acid sour, and by the 1890s American dispensers were pouring them by the thousand. Horsford's acid phosphate, marketed from the 1870s onward as a nerve tonic and "brain food," moved from the druggist's tonic shelf to the fountain syrup rail, where its slightly salty, drying sourness was often said to cut sugar better than citric acid and to keep fruit flavours from tasting cloying. That the fountain and the pharmacy were the same counter explains formulas like this one: a compound of four fruit syrups, dosed and drawn to order by a man who also filled prescriptions. Blends of strawberry, pineapple and cherry were the house standard, pear being used in small amounts as a rounding note rather than a flavour in its own right.