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Maumee Sorbet
Make a syrup of 1 orange, I peach, 1 banana, ½ pineapple, 1 ounce strawberries, enough simple syrup to make ½ gallon. Leave peel on oranges and cut them into cubes, peel banana and peach and cut into cubes, grate the pineapple and crush the strawberries. Add syrup and color the mixture pink. To serve, put ice cream in the bottom of the glass. Add 1 ounce of the above sorbet and fill with carbonated water in fine stream. This syrup must be made fresh every day.
A fountain "sorbet" is not a frozen dessert but a chopped-fruit syrup held cold and spooned into a glass, so read the word as a mixer rather than an ice. The recipe makes a bulk syrup and then a single drink from it.
- YieldHalf a gallon is 64 fluid ounces, and each drink takes one ounce of it, so the batch dresses roughly 60 sodas. Scale down hard for home use: an eighth of the fruit and about a pint of finished syrup is still a dozen or more drinks.
- Simple syrup at the fountainSoda-fountain and pharmacy simple syrups were typically much heavier than modern 1:1 bar syrup, in the region of two parts sugar to one of water by weight, close to saturation. That density is presumably part of why one ounce can flavour a whole glass.
- The peelLeaving the peel on the orange is deliberate, and the oil in the zest will carry aroma into the syrup. Use an unwaxed orange, scrub it, and cut the cubes small; standing pith can add bitterness.
- An ounce of strawberriesProbably a weight rather than a volume, and either way a small quantity, on the order of two large berries. Crushed rather than sliced, so the juice bleeds into the syrup and carries colour.
- Colouring it pinkPeriod fountains used cochineal or aniline colours by the drop. A teaspoon of strawberry or beet juice does the same job now; the point is only that the fruit alone reads dull yellow-grey in the glass.
- Drawing the soda"Fine stream" means the small nozzle on the carbonated-water draft arm, used to finish a drink without knocking the gas out. At home, tilt the glass and pour cold seltzer down the side slowly; adding it fast will foam the syrup over the rim.
- Assembly order mattersIce cream first, then syrup, then water. Reversing it gives you a glass of foam and a scoop stranded on top.
- Why it must be fresh dailyCut banana and peach oxidise within hours and the sugars in an uncooked fruit syrup begin fermenting at room temperature. Keep it refrigerated, taste before use, and discard anything fizzy or winey.
The American Soda Book belongs to the trade literature written for dispensers rather than housewives: formulas sized to a working fountain, expressed in gallons and ounces, with the assumption that a marble counter, a draft arm and a tub of ice cream were on hand. Fountain "sorbets" of this kind were fresh-fruit syrups meant to distinguish one shop from the next during the years when the soda fountain was a fixture of the American drugstore. The name is almost certainly geographic, after the Maumee River and the town of Maumee in northwestern Ohio, near Toledo; fountain drinks were often said to take their names from rivers, resorts and local landmarks to give a house recipe a proprietary ring, though no documented origin for this particular formula survives. The instruction to remake the syrup every day is the honest part of the entry, and a reminder that before reliable refrigeration a fruit syrup was a perishable good, not a bottled one.