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Mazurka
One ounce mazurka syrup, 1 ounce orange juice, 3 dashes phosphate. Stir while adding hot soda. To make the mazurka syrup take 2 ounces sherry wine, 3 ounces kola wine, 4 ounces currant juice, 1 ounce foam extract, 2 drams fruit acid, 2 quarts simple syrup. Color with cochineal and mix thoroughly.
A hot fountain drink from the era when a soda counter sold as much steaming beverage in January as it did cold in July. Two of the six syrup ingredients no longer exist as commercial articles, so this is a recipe to read closely before shopping.
- "Hot soda" is not soda waterFountains kept a hot-water draft arm alongside the carbonated one, and hot soda means plain hot water drawn over the syrup in the glass. Carbonation would be lost at that temperature. The recipe gives no quantity; figure roughly 5 to 6 ounces of hot water to the 1 ounce of syrup, in a warmed glass.
- PhosphateAcid phosphate, the fountain's standard sour agent, and still sold for cocktail and soda use. Three dashes from a dasher bottle amount to a small fraction of a teaspoon; it sharpens the drink without the fruity edge of lemon.
- Kola wineA pharmacy preparation of kola nut in sweet wine, sold as a tonic and gone from the market for a century. Kola nut tincture or a strong kola-nut infusion let down in a fortified wine is the nearest approach; a bitter amaro will fill the same structural role if you are only after balance.
- Foam extractA saponin solution, usually from quillaia (soapbark) or yucca, used to give fountain drinks a lasting head. Food-grade quillaia extract is still made and is used at very small doses; follow the supplier's rate rather than the ounce called for here, which reflects a much weaker nineteenth-century preparation.
- Fruit acid, 2 dramsTwo apothecary drams is about 1/4 ounce or 7 grams of dry acid crystals, normally citric or tartaric. Dissolve it in a little of the syrup before combining, or it will settle as grit.
- CochinealCarmine, from the dried insect, giving the crimson that made currant syrups look like currants. Still sold as liquid carmine for baking. Not vegetarian; beet or black-carrot concentrate colours similarly if that matters.
- Currant juiceAlmost certainly red currant rather than black, and presumably unsweetened. Bottled red currant juice or strained juice from thawed frozen currants both work; if only cordial is available, cut the simple syrup back to compensate.
- YieldThe syrup batch comes to about 74 ounces, a little over 2 1/4 quarts, enough for roughly 70 drinks at an ounce each. Halve or quarter it. Bottled and refrigerated, a syrup at this sugar concentration should keep for some weeks; the wine and fruit juice make it less durable than a plain fruit syrup, so smell before using.
The mazurka is a Polish dance in triple time that swept European ballrooms in the nineteenth century, and fountain dispensers of the 1900s may well have borrowed from the music and dance vocabulary of the day for drink names, as they are often said to have done with sports heroes, colleges and cities. The formula itself is a period portrait: kola, then newly fashionable as a stimulant after the kola-nut tonics of the 1880s and 90s; sherry and a wine tonic, still unremarkable at a drugstore counter before Prohibition; acid phosphate, the fountain's house souring agent; and foam extract, the trade's answer to the demand that every drink arrive with a head. That it is served hot points to a commercial reality often forgotten - soda fountains needed winter trade, and hot chocolate, hot beef tea, hot lemonade and hot spiced fountain drinks kept the marble counter earning through the cold months.