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Marmalade Syrup
Quince Syrup or Jelly, 6 pints; Maple Syrup, 2 pints. Mix and strain.
A two-ingredient fountain syrup that depends entirely on the quality of its parts, since nothing is cooked and nothing is corrected. Read "syrup or jelly" as an either/or: the jelly must be melted down before it will strain.
- Scale it downEight pints is a gallon of syrup, a commercial quantity. A tenth batch — roughly 1 1/4 cups quince to 1/2 cup maple — is more useful at home and keeps the proportions intact.
- Quince syrupNot a supermarket item. Quince jelly is sold in Middle Eastern, Spanish and Portuguese groceries and is the practical substitute; warm it gently with a splash of water until it is pourable, then strain. Avoid membrillo paste, which is too dense to thin cleanly.
- Maple syrupPeriod formularies sometimes carried maple syrups cut or imitated with cane sugar, so the character varied. Real Grade A dark (the old Grade B) gives the assertive flavor the recipe is reaching for; a delicate golden syrup will disappear behind the quince.
- Strain properlyThe instruction is doing real work. Quince jelly carries pectin skin and fruit fiber that will cloud a glass and clog a pump; run the mixed syrup through a fine sieve lined with a double layer of cheesecloth while it is still warm.
- Sugar densityFountain syrups were held at a heavy sugar concentration so they would keep at room temperature and hold their line in soda water. The recipe gives no density, and the sugar content of a homemade quince syrup is unpredictable, so do not assume shelf stability: refrigerate and use within two or three weeks.
- Serving at the fountainServing -- The recipe says nothing about service. A typical fountain pour was on the order of 1 to 1 1/2 fluid ounces of syrup into the glass before the carbonated water. Over ice with soda it also works as a shrub-adjacent drink if you add a teaspoon of lemon juice per glass.
- YieldThe full recipe makes one gallon, enough for roughly 100 fountain drinks. The scaled version makes about 14 fl oz, or a dozen glasses.
The name is the puzzle and the answer is etymological: marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff paste of quinces, from marmelo, quince. Only later did English usage drift toward citrus, so a soda man calling a quince preparation "marmalade syrup" was using the older, more accurate sense of the word. Quince was a staple of the American preserving closet through the nineteenth century — high in pectin, too hard and astringent to eat raw, and therefore destined for jelly. The pairing with maple is characteristically American: two domestic, distinctly regional sweeteners standing in for the imported fruit syrups that filled European soda formularies. Fountain books of this era are full of such two-line entries, less recipes than ratios, written for a dispenser who already knew how to work a strainer and a carbonator and needed only to be told what to mix.