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Mint Syrup
Green mint, 3 bunches; simple syrup, 6 pints; mix and bring to a boil over slow heat, strain through cloth and add simple syrup, 2 pints; acid, ½ ounce; and color light green.
A soda-fountain bulk syrup, written for someone making a gallon at a time behind a counter. The proportions scale down cleanly if you divide everything by four.
- The hinge: heat as briefly as possibleMint's aroma is carried by volatile oils that boil off with the steam. Bring the syrup just to a boil, pull it from the heat, and let it stand covered until cool before straining; a rolling boil for any length of time gives a syrup that tastes of cooked grass rather than mint.
- "Three bunches" is genuinely vagueFountain manuals assumed whatever the market bunch of the day was, and its size is not recorded, so the quantity cannot be pinned down. Taste as it steeps rather than trusting the count.
- Which mint"Green mint" in fountain usage meant spearmint, the standard mint of American soda work. Peppermint gives a sharper, more medicinal syrup and was usually specified by name when wanted.
- Simple syrupFountain simple syrup was heavy: about 2 pounds of sugar per pint of water, near saturation, which is what kept it from fermenting in an open jar. Thinner syrup will need refrigeration and will not hold more than a week or two.
- "Acid, ½ ounce"The book does not say which acid or in what form. Fountain work commonly used a stock solution of citric or tartaric acid, though dry crystals cannot be ruled out at this quantity. Strengths varied by house, so add a little at a time and adjust by taste; the acid is there to cut the sugar.
- ColoringNineteenth-century green colors ranged from vegetable dyes to metallic pigments that no one should now put in a drink. Use a food-grade green, and add it a drop at a time after straining, since the mint infusion itself is a dull olive.
- Straining"Through cloth" means a doubled cheesecloth or jelly bag. Do not press the leaves; squeezing pushes bitter chlorophyll and fine sediment into a syrup meant to be clear.
- Yield and useAbout 8 pints. At the fountain the dose was roughly 1 to 1½ ounces of syrup in a glass filled with carbonated water; the same ratio works for a mint phosphate, or use it as a sweetener in iced tea and juleps.
Soda-fountain work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran on stock syrups: a row of numbered bottles or draft jars from which the dispenser built drinks to order, and books like this one existed to standardize them. Mint sat with lemon, orange, sarsaparilla and vanilla among the everyday flavors, valued less as a drink of its own than as a cooling note and as the base for the mint phosphate, in which a few drops of acid phosphate gave the glass a dry tang. The near-saturated sugar syrup and the added acid solution would have helped preservation as well as flavor, since a fountain jar sat at room temperature through a long working day. Spearmint was generally the "green mint" of American trade.