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Nerve Tonic Syrup
American Nerve Tonic Extract, 2½ ounces; Simple Syrup, 1 gallon; American Sarsaparilla Color, 1 ounce; American Soda Foam, ½ ounce. With thousands of customers soda water is apt to taste as the fountain looks.
This is a bar formula rather than a kitchen recipe: four bought preparations stirred into a gallon of syrup and drawn at the fountain against carbonated water. Two of the four ingredients no longer exist in any recognisable form, which is the first thing to settle.
- The tonic extract is the problem"American Nerve Tonic Extract" was a proprietary flavouring sold by a supply house, and no published formula tells you what was in it. Period nerve tonics generally drew on some combination of kola, coca, celery seed, damiana, gentian and caffeine, and medicinal versions sometimes carried active drugs; what was in this particular bottle is unknown. Without knowing, the recipe cannot be reproduced and should not be guessed at.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesOunces here are most likely fluid ounces -- fountain formulas generally measured liquid extracts and colours by fluid ounce rather than by weight. That gives 2½ fl oz of flavouring to a gallon (128 fl oz) of syrup, roughly 1 part in 51.
- Simple syrup at the fountain is much heavier than kitchen syrupFountain simple syrups of this era were made close to saturation, far denser than a 1:1 kitchen syrup, both to resist fermentation in an open jar and to avoid thinning the drink. A 1:1 syrup would give a weak, watery glass.
- Soda foam is a saponin preparationThe half ounce of "Soda Foam" was almost always a soapbark (quillaia) or saponin extract, added purely so the drink held a head. Quillaia is still permitted as a beverage foaming agent but only at tightly limited levels; the fountain trade used it far more freely.
- Sarsaparilla colour is cosmeticSarsaparilla colour is essentially cosmetic -- most likely a caramel-based dark colouring contributing little or no flavour; the ounce exists to make the syrup look like the root beers and sarsaparillas beside it. Omitting it changes little but the shade.
- Yield and drawingA gallon of syrup at 1 to 1½ fl oz per glass gives roughly 85 to 128 drinks, each topped with carbonated water and stirred. The syrup was not diluted in bulk; it sat in the jar and met the water in the glass.
- The closing line is a shop note, not a stepThe closing line is a shop remark, not a step -- "soda water is apt to taste as the fountain looks" ties the perceived quality of the drink to the visible cleanliness of the fountain.
Soda fountains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century sat inside drugstores, and their drinks list read like a shelf of patent medicines: pepsin, celery, kola, coca, phosphates, bromo preparations and "nerve tonics" for the era's fashionable diagnosis of neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Coca-Cola itself began in 1886 as a fountain syrup sold on tonic claims. Formulas like this one show how the trade actually worked: the druggist bought a flavouring extract, a colour and a foaming agent from a supply catalogue and did nothing more than measure them into syrup, so the same drink name could appear in a hundred towns tasting more or less alike. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, and the labelling and narcotic laws that followed it, gradually stripped the medicinal wording and the more active ingredients out of these syrups, leaving the flavours behind as ordinary soft drinks.