Home › At the Fountain › Lactart Sherbet Syrup
Lactart Sherbet Syrup
Orange Syrup, 10 ounces; Pineapple Syrup, 10 66 ounces; Vanilla Syrup, 10 66 ounces; Lactart, 6 66. Mix thoroughly.
A fountain syrup blend, not a finished drink: three ounces of flavour to a splash of acid, mixed cold and drawn against carbonated water. The whole point is the lactart, and that is the one ingredient you cannot buy under that name.
- Those stray 66sAlmost certainly mangled ditto marks (") standing for "ounces" repeated. Read the formula as orange 10 oz, pineapple 10 oz, vanilla 10 oz, lactart 6 oz, all fluid measure.
- What lactart wasA proprietary acidulant of the 1880s and 90s: lactic acid diluted in water, sold to druggists as a milder, less "biting" souring agent than citric or phosphoric acid. Its exact strength is not certain; secondary accounts put it somewhere in the region of a quarter-strength solution.
- Substituting for itFood-grade lactic acid is sold today at about 80-88 percent. Diluting it roughly one part acid to two and a half parts water brings it to about a quarter strength, which is the usual estimate for lactart; build the blend with the dilution, not with the concentrate.
- The syrups are 1:1 stock, not squashThe syrups are rich stock, not squash -- Fountain orange, pineapple and vanilla syrups of this period were heavy sugar syrups, nearer two parts sugar to one of water than 1:1, carrying flavour and colour. Modern bar syrups work; cordials or diluted drink concentrates do not, and will leave the finished blend thin and under-sweet against the acid.
- Yield and serviceThirty-six fluid ounces of syrup, a little over a quart. At fountain rates of about 1 to 1.5 oz per glass topped with cold soda water, that is roughly two dozen to three dozen drinks.
- Balance it before you bottle itAcid strength is the variable here. Draw one test glass, taste it against soda, and adjust the lactart before mixing the whole batch; too much reads as sharply sour rather than refreshing.
- KeepingThe acid helps, but this is dilute sugar syrup. Refrigerate it and use it within a couple of weeks; look for cloudiness or ropiness as the sign it has gone.
"Sherbet" at the American soda fountain did not mean frozen dessert. It carried the older sense, traceable through Turkish şerbet and Arabic sharba, of a sweetened, tart drink of water and fruit, and fountain men used it for anything acidulated enough to prickle. Lactart belongs to a specific moment in that trade: through the 1880s and 90s dispensers were sold a parade of branded acids and "phosphates" on quasi-medical grounds, and lactic acid was promoted as the wholesome one, the acid of sour milk and of the body itself, gentler on the stomach than citric. Books like this one exist to give the man behind the marble counter a shelf of ready formulas that used up whatever the wholesaler had pushed on him, which is why a page can consist of nothing but four proportions and the instruction to mix thoroughly.