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Fruit Spray
Make a syrup of 4 ounces pineapple syrup, 4 ounces strawberry syrup, 4 drams vanilla extract, 2 ounces port wine, and serve solid like phosphate.
A fountain formula rather than a drink: you are mixing a small batch of flavoring syrup, then dispensing it a portion at a time. The whole thing depends on knowing what a phosphate is, since that word carries all the instructions the writer left out.
- DramsA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, so 4 drams of vanilla extract is 1/2 ounce, about a tablespoon. Druggists' recipes of this period often fall back on apothecary measure for small quantities.
- What the batch makesTotal volume is about 10 1/2 ounces of finished syrup. At the usual fountain portion of 1 to 1 1/2 ounces per glass, that is roughly seven to ten drinks.
- "Serve solid like phosphate"The hinge of the recipe. A phosphate is syrup plus a few dashes of acid phosphate, filled with carbonated water and stirred — no cream, no ice cream, no egg. "Solid" here most likely means the drink is drawn plain in that manner, rather than built up with foam or a float, though the recipe leaves the term unexplained.
- Acid phosphateA dilute phosphoric acid preparation, usually with calcium, magnesium and potassium phosphates, sold by druggists then and still available from cocktail and soda suppliers now. It gives a dry, mineral tartness that citrus juice does not imitate; period books call for anything from a dash to half an ounce per glass, and modern users often start around 1/4 teaspoon.
- Fountain syrupsPineapple and strawberry syrup here mean sweet, heavy, near-saturated fruit syrups, not modern thin coffee-bar syrups and not fruit juice. Snow-cone or Italian soda syrups are the closest ready substitute.
- The portTwo ounces in a 10 1/2-ounce batch is nearly a fifth of the syrup, so a single portion carries about a teaspoon and a half of port — enough for colour and a faint winey depth rather than any real strength. Any inexpensive ruby port does the job.
- AssemblyDraw the syrup into a soda glass, add the acid phosphate, fill with cold carbonated water and stir. Serve immediately; the carbonation is the point and it does not wait.
Soda fountains in the United States were pharmacy fixtures, and their recipe books read like prescriptions because many of the men writing them were dispensing chemists — hence drams, hence acid phosphate, hence the confident instruction to "serve solid" without further explanation. Phosphates were among the most popular fountain drinks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, valued for a sharpness that cut the syrup's sweetness in a way plain sweet soda could not. The 2 ounces of port is a reminder that a modest amount of wine in a fountain formula was not unusual before Prohibition, and such lines become much rarer in the trade manuals afterwards.