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Mint Cordial Frappe Syrup
Raspberry vinegar, 4 ounces; fruit acid, 1½ ounces; extract ginger ale, 1½ ounces; brandy, 4 ounces; simple syrup, 1 gallon. Mix, strain, and serve as follows: Shaven ice, 1 tumblerful; mint cordial syrup, 2 ounces; fresh mint (pressed to side of glass with spoon), 4 sprigs; plain soda, i tumblerful. Stir and serve with straws.
This is two recipes in one: a gallon batch of flavoured syrup, then the per-glass build. The proportions are druggist's proportions, written for someone working behind a marble counter with a graduate and a bottle rack.
- The name is misleadingNothing in the syrup is mint. The mint arrives only as four fresh sprigs bruised against the inside of the glass, so the quality of that step decides the drink. Press firmly enough to release oil but not so hard that you shred leaf into the soda.
- Raspberry vinegarNot a salad vinegar. In fountain and household books of this period raspberry vinegar means a sweetened fruit shrub — raspberries steeped in vinegar, strained, and boiled with sugar. A modern drinking shrub is the right substitute; plain raspberry-flavoured white vinegar is not.
- Fruit acidThe trade term for a solution of citric or tartaric acid, sold ready-made to druggists. Strengths varied, so ½ ounce here is not a fixed quantity — mix the syrup, taste, and add acid a little at a time until it reads tart rather than sour.
- Extract of ginger aleA concentrated compound flavouring, not the finished soft drink. If you cannot source a ginger ale extract, a strong ginger extract or tincture is the nearest thing, used sparingly and to taste; using bottled ginger ale instead will simply thin the syrup.
- Reading the quantitiesThe fruit acid and ginger ale extract were checked against the printed page and read 1½ ounces each, as given here. The "i tumblerful" of plain soda is one tumblerful.
- Tumbler and shaven iceA fountain tumbler ran about 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Shaven ice is finely shaved, not cubed or coarsely crushed — it is what makes the drink a frappé, and cubes will leave the syrup sitting at the bottom no matter how you stir.
- Brandy in a sodaFour ounces of brandy across a gallon of syrup works out to well under a teaspoon per two-ounce serving. It is there as a flavour rounder in the old apothecary manner, and can be left out with little loss.
- YieldThe batch makes a little over a gallon of syrup, enough for roughly 65 glasses at two ounces each. For household quantities, divide the whole formula by four and use a quart of simple syrup.
The American soda book belongs to a large family of manuals written for pharmacists rather than cooks: through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the soda fountain was a fixture of the American drugstore, and the man dispensing prescriptions was also the man building your frappé. The vocabulary here — fruit acid, extract, graduate measures, formulas by the gallon — comes straight from the dispensing counter. Raspberry vinegar, the base of this syrup, is older still: sweetened fruit-and-vinegar shrubs were a standard summer cooler in British and American households well before commercial soda water, and they survived into the fountain era because acid makes a sweet drink taste refreshing rather than cloying. Frappé, borrowed from French, simply means iced or chilled, and on a fountain menu it signalled a drink built over shaved ice rather than served plain.