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Kola Champagne
Stock Champagne Syrup, 7 pints; Kola Wine, 1 pint; American Fruit Acid, 3 ounces; American Sarsaparilla Color, ½ ounce; American Extract Vanilla, 1 ½ ounces.
This is a fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: a compounding sheet for a bulk syrup that a dispenser would draw an ounce or two of into a glass and finish with carbonated water. Most of the ingredients are proprietary trade preparations sold by supply houses, which is the main obstacle to reproducing it.
- What it makesThe quantities total roughly a gallon of finished syrup — at a fountain draw of 1 to 1½ ounces per glass, that is somewhere between about ninety and a hundred and thirty drinks.
- There is no champagne in it"Champagne" at the soda fountain named a flavor profile, not an ingredient: a pale, sharply acidulated syrup meant to suggest sparkling wine once charged water was added. Stock Champagne Syrup was itself a compounded base, usually simple syrup with a champagne or "champagne cider" flavoring extract.
- Kola WineA tincture of kola nut in a fortified wine, sold ready-made and valued for its caffeine as a "tonic" ingredient. Nothing sold under that name today is the same article, and a modern substitution would have to be worked out by taste.
- American Fruit AcidA branded solution, generally citric or tartaric acid in water, used to give the tartness that reads as "wine." Because the maker's strength is not stated, three ounces of it cannot be converted to a weight of dry acid with any confidence — the acid level would have to be built up by tasting.
- American Sarsaparilla ColorColoring only, no flavor of consequence at half an ounce in a gallon. Colors of this kind were commonly caramel-based, used here to take the syrup off dead white and toward a pale amber.
- Proportion of vanillaAn ounce and a half of extract per gallon of syrup is a background note, not a vanilla flavor. It rounds the acid and the kola bitterness rather than announcing itself.
- Mixing and keepingEverything here is cold-mixed; there is no cooking step, and heating the syrup would be expected to drive off the vanilla and champagne aromatics. The sugar concentration gives it some keeping quality, though the wine base likely makes it less stable than a plain fruit syrup.
Kola arrived at the American soda fountain in the 1880s and 1890s on the strength of its reputation as a nerve tonic, and for a time kola formulas were a common feature of fountain guides — kola champagne, kola phosphate, kola tonic, kola cream. The word "champagne" on a syrup list belongs to an older fountain habit of borrowing prestige names for temperance drinks: champagne, claret, sherry cobbler and cider all appeared as flavors mixed from syrup and charged water, sold in states and seasons where the real thing was unavailable or unwelcome. A formula like this one also shows how the trade actually worked. The dispenser is not extracting kola nuts or macerating vanilla beans; he is buying prepared compounds from a supply house and combining them by weight and measure, which is why the ingredient names read like a catalogue index.