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Orange Syrup, Florida
American Florida Orange Extract, 2 ounces; Simple Syrup, 1 gallon; American Fruit Acid, 1 ounce; American Yellow Vegetable Color, 66; American Soda Foam, 66. American Florida Orange Extract is entirely soluble in syrup in any proportions, possesses a fine flavor, and has good keeping qualities. We strongly recommend it, and advise its use. The formula may be varied by the use of more extract, if a more pronounced flavor is desired. Keep a tempting list of flavors in plain sight.
A fountain syrup formula rather than a kitchen recipe: everything here is a concentrate, and the numbers assume a dispensing counter that turned over gallons a week. It scales down cleanly to a quart if you divide by four.
- The "66" is unexplainedThe color and foam are given as bare figures with no unit. Such numbers may refer to drops from a standard dropper, or to catalogue or dilution codes; the text does not say. Treat the quantity as genuinely ambiguous and add color and foam a few drops at a time to effect.
- American Fruit AcidProbably a house name for a citric acid solution, possibly with tartaric added. One ounce to the gallon supplies the sourness that makes orange syrup read as orange rather than as sugar. Powdered citric acid dissolved in an equal weight of water gets you to roughly the same place, but start at half and taste.
- Soda foamA saponin extract, historically from quillaia (soapbark) or yucca, used purely to hold a head on the finished glass. It contributes no flavor. Quillaia extract remains a permitted beverage additive, but it is a fountain ingredient, not a grocery one.
- Fountain simple syrup is not bar simple syrupSoda work used a heavy syrup, on the order of six to seven pounds of sugar to the gallon of finished syrup, not the 1:1 by volume of a cocktail bar. A thinner syrup here will taste weak and will not keep.
- Vegetable colorThe yellow would have been a plant-derived or early coal-tar color depending on the maker. Annatto or a modern turmeric-based yellow gives the same effect; the recipe works without it, it simply looks pale.
- Extract strength variesTwo ounces of a period orange extract is not two ounces of a modern one, and the text itself invites you to increase it. Mix a small test batch, dilute it at serving strength, and adjust before committing a gallon.
- Yield and serviceA gallon of syrup at the standard fountain pour of about one and a quarter ounces per glass, topped with carbonated water, gives roughly one hundred drinks.
Books like this were published by flavoring houses for the druggists who ran soda fountains, and the recipes double as advertisements: every capitalized ingredient here is a product the reader was expected to order by name, and the paragraph praising the extract's solubility and keeping qualities is sales copy sitting inside a formula. "Florida" was doing similar work. Florida citrus had become a national shipping crop in the late nineteenth century, and the state's name on a label carried that association, whatever was actually in the bottle. The closing line, advising the operator to keep a tempting list of flavors in plain sight, is the clearest sign of the genre: the fountain sold variety as much as it sold soda, and a long flavor board was the point of buying a dozen extracts.