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Kola Syrup
Kola Extract, 3 ounces; Claret Wine, 6 ounces; American Raspberry Juice, ½ pint; American Fruit Acid, 3 ounces. Plain syrup to make 1 gallon.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen one: this makes a gallon of flavoring syrup to be drawn an ounce or so at a time and finished with carbonated water. Several of the ingredients are trade products rather than groceries.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" was a heavy sugar syrup, generally heavier than a modern 1:1 simple syrup, though published proportions varied a good deal from one house to another. Everything else here is added first, then plain syrup is poured in to bring the total to one gallon (128 fl oz).
- Kola extractA fluid extract of kola nut (Cola nitida or C. acuminata), bitter and caffeinated, sold by drug wholesalers. Strengths were not standardized between houses, so three ounces in a gallon gives an unpredictable caffeine dose by modern reckoning. Present-day kola extracts vary just as much; start well under the stated amount and taste.
- American Fruit AcidA proprietary acidulant solution, most often citric or a citric-tartaric blend in water. The concentration is not recoverable, so the three ounces cannot be converted honestly — treat acid as something to add to taste at the end rather than measure from this line.
- American Raspberry JuiceIn fountain usage this generally meant the strained, often preserved juice of red raspberries rather than a finished syrup, though goods sold under such trade names were not always pure fruit. A half pint is 8 fl oz. Unsweetened raspberry puree pressed and strained works; account for its own sugar.
- ClaretA dry red Bordeaux or a Bordeaux-style blend. Six ounces in a gallon is a little under 5 percent of the syrup by volume, which works out to well under 1 percent alcohol in the syrup and far less in the glass, but it is still alcohol in a soft drink — worth knowing if serving to children or anyone avoiding it. Omitting it costs some tannin and color, nothing more.
- Drawing the drinkOne to one and a half fluid ounces of syrup in an 8 oz glass, filled with carbonated water and stirred once. A gallon therefore yields roughly 85 to 128 servings, which is why the batch size looks unreasonable for a home cook. Quarter or eighth it.
- KeepingA heavy sugar syrup with acid and a little wine keeps for weeks refrigerated, but the raspberry juice will brown and the kola bitterness will dull. Fountain operators made syrup in quantity because they moved it in days.
Kola arrived in American pharmacy in the 1880s and 1890s as a stimulant and "nerve tonic," the caffeine-bearing seed of a West African tree long chewed there as a mild stimulant and marker of hospitality. Druggists dispensed it as a fluid extract and, since American soda fountains were fixtures of the drugstore, the same extract slid easily into a syrup jar and onto the counter. Formularies of the period print dozens of kola variants — kola and celery, kola and coca, kola and beef and iron — each pitched at the tired brain worker. The claret in this version is doing what wine and a fruit acid usually did in fountain work: supplying color, tannin and a sour edge to make the bitterness of the extract read as flavor rather than medicine. The most famous descendant of this whole family of formulas was of course being sold in Atlanta by the same route, from a fountain, by a pharmacist.