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Orange Syrup, Maltese
American Maltese Orange Juice, 1 quart; Simple Syrup, 7 quarts. Add 2 ounces American Fruit Acid and 1 ounce each American Florida Orange Extract and American Soda Foam.
A fountain formula rather than a household one: it makes two gallons of finished syrup, and every component named "American" is a brand line from the supply house that published the book. Substitutions are straightforward once you know what each item did.
- Scale it downAs written this yields 8 quarts of syrup, enough for roughly 200 to 250 drinks at the standard fountain pour of an ounce to an ounce and a quarter per glass. Dividing everything by eight gives a single quart, which is about as much as a home refrigerator can justify.
- Maltese orangeThe Maltese, or Maltese blood, is a pigmented sweet orange of the sanguine group. Modern blood oranges (Moro, Tarocco, Sanguinello) are the direct stand-in; ordinary Valencia juice will taste right but will give a pale amber syrup rather than the reddish one intended.
- Simple syrup, fountain strengthTrade simple syrup of this period was generally heavier than the 1:1 of a cocktail bar, though published formulas vary from roughly equal weights of sugar and water up to near-saturation; it was boiled and strained. A thin syrup will taste watery once carbonated water hits it at five or six to one.
- Fruit acid"American Fruit Acid" was a proprietary solution, most likely citric and possibly with tartaric, and probably sold ready-diluted, though the recipe records only the trade name. Two ounces in eight quarts is a small correction for sweetness, not a flavour in its own right; start with a teaspoon of citric acid dissolved in water per quart of finished syrup and taste.
- Orange extractThe Florida orange extract is an oil-based flavouring that carries the peel note the juice alone cannot supply. It will not dissolve in syrup on its own — add it last, stir hard, and expect a faint cloud. A terpeneless orange extract stays clearer if clarity matters.
- Soda foamSoda foam was a saponin preparation, usually an extract of quillaia (soapbark) or yucca, added so the drink would raise a head under the draught arm. It contributes nothing to flavour and is entirely optional; commercial quillaia extract is still sold as a beverage foaming agent and is used in drops, not spoonfuls.
- KeepingNo preservative is added beyond the sugar and the acid themselves — fountain syrups were made in quantity because they turned over in days. Fresh juice in sugar syrup can still ferment. Refrigerate, and treat a home batch as a two-week proposition at most.
- ServingDraw an ounce and a quarter of syrup into a tall glass, fill with cold carbonated water under coarse stream, and stir once. The fruit acid is what keeps it from reading as candy.
Soda fountain manuals like this one appear to have served flavouring houses as much to sell their own bottled goods as to teach dispensers — at least, that would explain why nearly every line here carries a trade name. The Maltese orange itself is older than the fountain by centuries: blood-pigmented sweet oranges are generally traced to Sicily and the wider Mediterranean, and the Maltese was among the varieties shipped north as a luxury fruit and later planted in Florida and California. By the turn of the twentieth century a dispenser advertising "Maltese Orange" was making a claim about provenance and colour, the way a bar today might specify Tarocco. The formula also shows how much of fountain work was chemistry of appearance rather than taste — the acid to keep two gallons of sugar from cloying, the extract to restore the aroma that juice loses in syrup, and the foam to make the glass look like it had been worked on.