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Imperial Chocolate Syrup
Hudnut's Formula.
American Fountain Chocolate, 4½ lbs.; Sugar, 16 lbs.; Gelatin, 2 ounces; Water, 21/½ gallons; American Double Vanilla Extract, 6 ounces. Dissolve gelatin in 2 pints of water, add chocolate and sugar, boil all together, and when cold strain and add extract vanilla six ounces. Then beat well 8 eggs and add to the above.
A fountain-scale soda syrup from the era when druggists compounded their own flavorings by the barrel. It cannot be reproduced safely, but the formula is worth reading closely for what it says about commercial fountain practice.
- Why this one failsEight beaten eggs go into a syrup that has already been boiled, strained, and cooled — the eggs are never heated at all. Raw shell egg carries a real risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, and a sweet, dilute syrup held at room temperature would be a good growth medium rather than a hostile one.
- The sugar is not a preservative hereSixteen pounds of sugar in roughly two and a half gallons of water works out near 40 percent by weight — sweet, but nowhere near the concentration that suppresses bacterial growth. Add gelatin, a protein, and you have broth with sugar in it. Use a current commercial or tested chocolate syrup recipe instead.
- The ambiguous quantity"Water, 21/½ gallons" is a typesetting casualty. It is almost certainly 2½ gallons, given the sugar and chocolate weights; 21½ gallons would produce something closer to flavored water. Treat it as unresolved rather than settled.
- American Fountain ChocolateA trade product of the period, sold to fountains for exactly this use; the formula does not say what was in it. Nothing on a modern shelf is the same thing; unsweetened cocoa is closer than drinking chocolate but not equivalent.
- Gelatin's jobTwo ounces to two and a half gallons is a very light hand — this is not meant to set. The gelatin is a suspending agent, keeping cocoa solids from dropping to the bottom of the jar between customers. Modern syrups use xanthan or carrageenan for the same purpose.
- American Double Vanilla Extract"Double" was the trade term for extract at about twice ordinary strength, so six ounces here would answer to roughly twelve ounces of ordinary extract. Fountain formulas leaned on vanilla heavily.
- ScaleThe listed quantities come to roughly forty pounds of syrup, several hundred servings at a fountain ounce to an ounce and a half per glass. This is a bulk trade batch, not a household one.
Hudnut's is generally taken to have been one of the New York supply houses that sold flavoring extracts, crushed fruits, and "fountain chocolate" to druggists, and formula books like this one circulated their proprietary recipes as selling points for the ingredients. The egg is the giveaway to the period: before homogenized dairy and reliable refrigeration, fountain men used beaten egg to give chocolate syrup body and a foamy head when it hit carbonated water in the egg phosphate, a fixture of the American soda counter from the 1880s into the 1930s. "Imperial" carried no legal meaning; it was ordinary trade puffery, marking this as the house's best chocolate rather than its plain one. Raw egg gradually disappeared from fountain formulas over the following decades.