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Mead
Take 1 gallon of simple syrup, mix with 1 pound of well-strained honey, and let simmer on the fire for a while, skimming off the foam. When strained and cool, add 2 ounces of American Mead Extract, ½ ounce of American Soda Foam, and ½ ounce of American Sarsaparilla Color. For the fountain, take 11/½ gallons of the above prepared syrup, add 8½ gallons of well-filtered water, and charge to 115 pounds.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a home recipe: it makes a flavoring syrup in bulk, then tells the dispenser how to cut it with carbonated water. Most of the work is decoding proprietary trade goods and one garbled figure.
- The mangled measurement"11/½ gallons" is likely a typesetting error. Since 8½ gallons of water is added, the intended quantity is probably 1½ gallons of prepared syrup, giving a round 10 gallons — a syrup-to-water ratio of about 1:5.7.
- Simple syrup, fountain strengthNot the thin 1:1 syrup of a cocktail bar. Trade simple syrup of this era was near-saturated; period formulas call for something on the order of 13 to 14 pounds of sugar per gallon of water, yielding well over a gallon of syrup, and that density is what keeps an open bottle from fermenting on the counter.
- The branded extractsAmerican Mead Extract, American Soda Foam and American Sarsaparilla Color were catalogue products from a supply house, long discontinued. There is no substitution table for them; the mead extract was a compounded flavor, generally built on wintergreen, sassafras and vanilla notes.
- What "soda foam" wasA saponin foaming agent, usually an extract of quillaia (soap bark) or yucca, used to give the drink a head that survived being drawn. Quillaia extract is still permitted in beverages but only within specified limits, and it is not a general grocery item.
- Sarsaparilla colorEffectively caramel coloring, sold under a flavor name because the fountain trade ordered by drink rather than by chemical. It contributes tint, not taste.
- Simmering the honeyThe point of the brief simmer and skimming is to coagulate and lift the wax, pollen and protein that cloud honey when it is diluted. Take it no further than a bare simmer; boiling honey in syrup drives off the volatile aromatics that are the reason honey is in the formula at all.
- Add the flavors coldThe extracts and foam go in only after the syrup has cooled and been strained, as the instruction says. Heat scalps the flavor oils and knocks the foaming agent down.
- "Charge to 115 pounds"This is the carbonating pressure of a period fountain's copper cylinder, not anything a modern kegging or seltzer setup is built for — home CO2 equipment operates in the 10 to 40 psi range and its relief valves are sized accordingly. Treat the number as a historical specification, not an instruction to follow.
- YieldThe finished fountain batch is 10 gallons, about 160 servings of 8 ounces. The syrup itself makes a little over a gallon before dilution.
Soda-fountain "mead" has almost nothing to do with fermented honey wine. Through the second half of the nineteenth century American fountains sold a family of sweet, foaming, honey-tinged drinks under that name, and the trade press of the period lists mead alongside sarsaparilla, birch beer and ginger ale as a standard dispenser flavor; the honey and the froth were what justified the borrowed word. Books like this one were written for the dispenser rather than the cook, which is why the formula assumes a house stock of near-saturated simple syrup and reads more like a specification than a recipe: quantities in gallons, colors and foamers ordered from a catalogue by brand, and a closing line about tank pressure.