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Kentucky Belle Syrup
One pint prepared strawberry; 1 pint vanilla syrup. To 1½ ounces of this mixture add ½ ounce rich cream and teaspoonful pulverized sugar. Draw fine stream first to mix cream and syrup, then coarse stream to nearly fill the glass, and finish with fine stream.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen one: you make the syrup in bulk, then build each drink to order at the carbonated-water arm. Almost everything here depends on understanding the draft equipment the original assumed.
- The syrup measureThe printed page reads 1½ ounces of the mixture, as our text now gives. That falls within the usual fountain range of about one to two ounces of syrup per glass, so pour to taste from there.
- Fine stream and coarse streamThese are the two settings on a fountain draft arm: a narrow jet that agitates and emulsifies, and a wide flow that fills the glass. Improvising at home, use a hard splash of seltzer to whip the cream and syrup together, then pour gently down the side of the glass, then finish with another sharp splash to raise the head.
- Prepared strawberryNot jam and not fresh berries. In fountain usage this is crushed strawberries cooked or macerated with sugar into a heavy fruit syrup, thinned to pouring consistency. A good bottled strawberry soda syrup stands in.
- Vanilla syrupPeriod vanilla syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, considerably denser than a modern coffee-bar syrup, flavoured with vanilla extract. Modern vanilla syrups are thinner, so expect a lighter result.
- Pulverized sugarFinely ground sugar, the equivalent of today's superfine or caster sugar. Powdered confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will cloud the drink; use superfine, which dissolves in the cream without grit.
- Rich creamFountain "rich cream" meant something close to modern heavy cream. Half-and-half will not give the same body, and the drink is built on that mouthfeel.
- YieldThe syrup base makes one quart. How many drinks that yields depends on the pour: at the conjectured ounce and a half, roughly twenty; at the half ounce the text actually prints, many more. Refrigerate it, and expect the fruit purée rather than the sugar to limit its life.
- ServingBuild in a tall 8- to 10-ounce soda glass, serve immediately with a straw and a long spoon. A cream-and-soda drink will separate on standing, which is why fountain work was done to order.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran to hundreds of formulas like this one, most of them permutations of a few stock syrups — vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, lemon — recombined and given a saleable name. The name mattered as much as the flavour: a dispenser competing with the shop across the street could not offer a new fruit, but he could offer a Kentucky Belle. Regional and sentimental titles were common currency, and "Kentucky Belle" was also in circulation as the title of a widely reprinted narrative poem, though whether the drink took its name from the poem cannot be shown. What distinguishes the drink itself is the cream, worked into the syrup with the fine stream before the glass is filled: that technique, agitating fat and sugar with the gas jet, is the whole craft of fountain dispensing compressed into one line, and it is why these drinks were made at a counter by a trained hand rather than poured from a bottle.