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Iron, Malt and Phosphate Syrup
Orange Syrup, 21/½ pints; Lemon Syrup, 2 pints; Pineapple Syrup, 1 pint; American Acid Phosphate, 8 ounces; Extract of Malt, 2 pints; Solution of Phosphate of Iron, 1 ounce.
This is a druggist's formula rather than a kitchen recipe: a bulk fountain syrup, roughly seven and a half pints of it, to be drawn an ounce or so at a time and finished with carbonated water. One of its six ingredients is a medicine, and that is where it stops being reproducible.
- Solution of phosphate of ironThis was a pharmaceutical preparation dispensed under formulary strength, not a food ingredient, and nothing sold today corresponds to it. Substituting any modern iron supplement is guesswork, because the iron content of the original is unknown and the recipe gives no dose per glass.
- Iron is dose-limited, not seasoningIron in soluble form is acutely toxic in overdose and children are especially vulnerable to it. A syrup jar of unknown iron strength, dispensed by eye at a fountain, has no place in a domestic kitchen; if you want an iron preparation, that is a matter for a pharmacist and a label.
- Extract of malt was also a drug counter itemThe malt extract here is the thick medicinal extract sold as a tonic and nutrient, close to but not identical with brewers' malt syrup. Its role is body and a faintly bitter maltiness that reads as "medicinal" to modern palates.
- Acid phosphateAmerican Acid Phosphate is a dilute mixture of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium phosphates, and it is still made for the cocktail and soda trade. It supplies sourness without the fruit flavour of citric acid, which is why the formula can carry this much orange and lemon without tasting like lemonade.
- On the measuresThe orange syrup quantity was checked against the printed page and matches what our text now gives. Pints here are 16 fluid ounces, and the 8 ounces of acid phosphate and 1 ounce of iron solution are fluid measures.
- If you want the drinkA malt-and-fruit phosphate without the iron is a normal soda fountain formula and current sources cover it. Use one of those rather than adapting this.
Fountain formulas like this one sat exactly where the American soda fountain began: at the back of a drugstore, where the same man compounded prescriptions and drew soda water. Acid phosphate, commercialised by Rumford Chemical Works in the later nineteenth century, was promoted as a restorative for "brain workers" and nervous exhaustion, and malt extract and iron phosphate belonged to the same vocabulary of tonics for the run-down and the anaemic. Combining all three with orange, lemon and pineapple syrup gave a druggist something he could sell as both refreshment and remedy, which was the commercial logic of the era's fountain trade. The federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a labelling and adulteration statute, was part of a broader regulatory shift over the following decades, and medicated syrups gradually disappeared from the fountain list, leaving behind the flavour side of the business — fruit syrups — which is the part still recognisable today.