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Fruit Syrup
Strawberry, raspberry, pineapple, blackberry, cherry, currant, etc.: Fruit juice (desired flavor), 1 quart; plain syrup, 3 quarts; fruit acid, 1 ounce; soda foam, 1 ounce. A good plan is to mix fruit juice and syrup, bring to boiling point and when cool add fruit acid and soda foam. This improves keeping qualities of syrup and developes taste of fruit more strongly. Color strawberry, cherry and currant with sol. carmine, taking care not to use too much coloring matter, as the public object to syrups too deeply colored. Color raspberry with carmine and caramel; peach a light yellow with saffron or sugar yellow.
This is a soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen one: a gallon of finished syrup meant to be pumped an ounce or so at a time into a glass and topped with carbonated water. Most of the work of translating it is in the trade terms.
- Plain syrupIn fountain practice this is a heavy simple syrup; published formulas vary, running from about equal weights of sugar and water up to the USP proportion of roughly 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. It is heavier than the 1:1 syrup usual in a home kitchen, and the sugar density helps slow fermentation.
- Fruit acidA solution of citric or tartaric acid, sold ready-made to dispensers. One ounce in a gallon is a corrective for flat, over-sweet juice; food-grade citric acid dissolved in an equal weight of water does the same job. The book gives no strength for the solution, so start with less and taste.
- Soda foamFoam extract, a saponin preparation usually based on quillaia bark, sometimes on egg albumen or gum acacia. It exists only to give head on the finished drink and contributes nothing to flavour. It can simply be left out.
- Why the acid goes in coldAcid added to hot syrup inverts some of the sugar and can thin the body of the batch. The recipe's own stated reasons for the order are keeping quality and stronger fruit flavour.
- The trade-off in boilingHeating pasteurises the juice and lengthens shelf life, which was the point at a fountain turning over gallons. The book claims boiling develops the fruit flavour more strongly; against that, heat drives off volatile aromatics, so an unheated syrup may taste fresher but must be treated as perishable.
- Colouring"Sol. carmine" is a solution of carmine, the cochineal colour, still sold as a food colour. "Sugar yellow" was a trade name of the period, probably one of the coal-tar yellows, with no clear modern equivalent worth chasing; saffron works but is expensive and adds its own flavour at any useful strength.
- StorageNo preservative is specified. Refrigerate the finished syrup in clean bottles and use it within a few weeks; discard at any sign of cloudiness, gas or a yeasty smell.
- YieldOne gallon, about 3.8 litres. At a fountain pour of 1 to 1.5 ounces per glass, that is roughly 85 to 128 drinks.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one were written for druggists, who through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran the fountain as an adjunct to the dispensing counter and compounded their own syrups from bulk sugar, juice and extracts. The instruction to go easy on the carmine is the interesting line: by the time books of this sort were circulating, the public had been reading about adulterated food and coal-tar dyes for years, though what a customer made of a garishly red strawberry syrup can only be guessed at. The list of flavours is a fair picture of what an American fountain offered -- straight fruit, acidulated, coloured by hand, and mixed a glass at a time.