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Maple Syrup
American Concentrated Maple Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 3 quarts. Serve with either plain or ice cream. This syrup also makes a delicious milk shake.
This is a fountain dispensing syrup, meant to be measured into a glass and finished with carbonated water, milk or ice cream rather than drunk as is. The whole thing hangs on what the first ingredient actually was.
- "American Concentrated Maple Syrup"This reads as the name of a trade concentrate of the sort sold to soda fountains, presumably stronger and sweeter than table maple syrup, though the product is not identified here. Diluting real Grade A maple syrup three parts to one with plain syrup gives a thin, barely maple drink; if you are working from the bottle, start closer to equal parts and taste.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" or "simple syrup" of the period was generally heavy, often close to saturation; published formulas vary, but something on the order of 2 parts granulated sugar to 1 part water by weight is at the heavy end, so it would keep and would not thin the drink. It is heavier than the 1:1 syrup most cocktail books mean today.
- YieldOne gallon (128 fl oz) of finished syrup. At a fountain pour of 1 to 1½ fluid ounces per glass, that is roughly 85 to 130 drinks, which is worth knowing before you mix a batch at home. Quarter or eighth the recipe.
- "Serve with either plain or ice cream""Plain" means a plain soda: syrup in the glass, a splash of cold water or cream, then carbonated water drawn hard and finished with a fine stream. "With ice cream" means the same build with a scoop dropped in — the ice cream soda.
- The milk shakeIn early 1900s fountain usage a milk shake commonly meant syrup and cold milk shaken, or later spindle-mixed, with cracked ice, often with no ice cream. Proportions were not fixed; something like 1½ oz syrup to 6 oz milk is a reasonable starting point. Modern thick shakes need the syrup dialed up because ice cream mutes flavor.
- Keeping itA heavy sugar syrup resists spoilage but is not sterile. Refrigerate, use a clean pour spout, and discard at the first sign of cloudiness or ropiness.
The soda fountain of the early twentieth century ran on bottled flavoring concentrates cut with house-made plain syrup, and this entry is a dispensing formula of exactly that kind: the skilled part happened in a factory, and the dispenser's job was dilution and proportion. Maple was a natural fountain flavor in the northeastern United States, where maple sugar had been a domestic sweetener long before cane sugar became cheap, and it carried a distinctly American association that soda houses were happy to trade on. Many such concentrates were not pure maple at all; imitation maple flavor, generally traced to fenugreek and vanillin compounded with caramel and sugar, was widespread and much cheaper than the real thing. The instruction that the same syrup will do for a plain soda, an ice cream soda and a milk shake reflects how these books were organized: one syrup, several builds.