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Maple Syrup (Sugar lbs Water quarts)
Maple Sugar, 3½ lbs.; Water, 2 quarts; American Fruit Acid, ½ ounce. Dissolve the sugar with the water by aid of heat, when cool add the fruit acid; serve with cream or ice cream. Careless clerks should not be employed at the soda fountain. Absolute neatness in dress should be insisted upon.
A soda-fountain syrup rather than a table syrup: heavy sugar, a dose of acid to brighten it, and a shelf life measured in days once the acid is in. The two things that need translating are the acid and the sugar itself.
- American Fruit AcidA proprietary fountain preparation of the period, usually citric or tartaric acid, sometimes sold dry as crystals and sometimes as a dilute solution. Half an ounce of dry citric acid in two quarts is close to 0.8 percent and distinctly sharp; half an ounce of a bottled solution would be far weaker. The original is genuinely ambiguous here, so add it a little at a time and taste.
- Maple sugarHard cake maple sugar was a common grocery item when this was written and is now a specialty product. Granulated maple sugar works directly; if you substitute maple syrup, 3½ lb of maple sugar corresponds roughly to two quarts of syrup, and you should cut the water back sharply to keep the syrup from being thin.
- Heat"By aid of heat" means warm the water enough to dissolve the sugar, not boil it. Boiling drives off the volatile aromatics that make maple taste like maple and pushes the syrup toward caramel.
- Add acid coldThe instruction to wait until cool is the hinge. Acid in hot sugar syrup inverts the sucrose and can throw off the maple character.
- Yield and dosingRoughly 3 quarts of finished syrup. Fountain practice was about 1 to 1½ fluid ounces of syrup per glass, and here it is served over ice cream or with cream as the recipe directs, which puts this somewhere in the region of 60 to 90 servings.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative here beyond the sugar concentration and the acid. Refrigerate, use within a week or two, and discard at the first sign of cloudiness or fermentation.
- The last two sentencesThe remarks about careless clerks and neatness of dress are shop-management advice aimed at the proprietor, not part of the method. Formularies of this kind often mixed counter discipline in with their formulas.
Books like this were written for the druggist who ran a soda fountain at the front of the shop, and they read as much like trade manuals as cookbooks: formulas by weight, and asides about how the counter should be run. Maple was a popular American fountain flavour, drawing on a sugar that New England and the upper Midwest produced in quantity and sold in hard cakes long before bottled syrup dominated the market. The "fruit acid" points to a commercial formula rather than a domestic one: fountain suppliers sold branded acid solutions to give sweet syrups the tang that fresh fruit would otherwise have supplied.