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Morning Dew
Make a syrup of 4 drams brandy, 1 dram sweet Catawba wine, 1 dram clove essence, 1 dram blood orange extract, 2 drams rose essence, 1 ounce strawberry juice, 1 ounce pineapple juice, sufficient gum foam and simple syrup enough to make one-half gallon.
This is a fountain syrup, not a finished drink: you build the half gallon, keep it in a syrup bottle, and draw an ounce or so into a glass before charging it with carbonated water. The flavor load is tiny relative to the volume, so measure the essences by weight or with a graduated dropper rather than by eye.
- Drams and ouncesThese are apothecary fluid measures. A fluid dram is 1/8 fluid ounce, about 3.7 ml, so 4 drams of brandy is half an ounce and 1 dram of clove essence is a little under a teaspoon. The whole batch of flavoring comes to roughly 3 fluid ounces in 64.
- Gum foamA fountain staple: gum arabic dissolved in hot water and sweetened, sometimes with egg white or saponin added for head retention. It gives body and a lasting foam when the soda is drawn. Modern equivalents are gum syrup or a gomme-style syrup; the recipe leaves the amount to the compounder's judgement.
- Essences are not extractsNineteenth-century "essence" of clove or rose was a strong alcoholic solution of the essential oil, far more concentrated than a supermarket flavoring. If you substitute a commercial extract, expect to need more; if you substitute the pure essential oil, you need drops, not drams.
- Blood orange extractSold at the time as a distinct fountain flavor, distinguished from sweet orange. It has largely disappeared from the trade; blood orange oil or a reduced blood orange juice will read closest, though the color contribution will differ.
- Sweet CatawbaA sweet wine, pale pink to white, from the American Catawba grape, once a mainstay of Ohio River valley wineries. It is still made in small quantities; any sweet labrusca-family wine is the nearest substitute.
- Fruit juices and keepingThe strawberry and pineapple juice are the perishable part. A heavy sugar syrup helps hold them, but a half gallon made at home with fresh juice should be refrigerated and used within a week or two. Straining the juices before adding keeps the syrup from clouding.
- AssemblingDissolve the sugar for the simple syrup fully and let it cool before adding the alcoholic essences, or you will drive off the aromatics. Combine flavorings, juices and gum foam first, then top up with simple syrup to the half-gallon mark.
- YieldHalf a gallon of syrup is about 64 servings at one ounce each, drawn into a glass and filled with soda water. Scale down to a cup of syrup for home use unless you are running a counter.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of proprietary house syrups with weather-and-daybreak names. "Morning Dew" belongs to that class: a floral-spiced fruit blend built on rose and clove, with brandy and wine present in quantities small enough to flavor rather than intoxicate, and gum foam to give the drawn glass a head. The apothecary units are the tell that these books were written for druggists, since the American soda fountain grew out of the pharmacy counter, where mineral waters were dispensed as a health article before they became a confection. Compounding by dram was simply the trade's ordinary arithmetic.