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Orange Syrup
American Concentrated Maltese Orange Syrup, 1 quart. Plain Syrup 2 or 3 quarts Fruit Acid, 1 ounce.
This is a dispensing formula rather than a cooking recipe: a druggist bought a bottle of proprietary concentrate and stretched it with his own stock syrup. Everything here is proportion, so the only real work is deciding what to substitute for the branded ingredient.
- The concentrate is the whole recipe"American Concentrated Maltese Orange Syrup" reads as a proprietary flavouring base bought ready-made, and no product survives under that name. A modern stand-in is a strong orange syrup or cordial made from blood orange juice reduced with sugar, plus a little grated zest for the oil that carries most of the aroma.
- Maltese orangeA nineteenth-century name for a blood orange type, sold today simply as blood orange. The flavour was prized for being darker and slightly raspberry-scented compared with the sweet Valencia types, and the fruit itself carries colour, though what a commercial concentrate contained is unknown.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain" or "simple" syrup of the period was generally heavier than modern simple syrup, sometimes approaching saturation so it would keep and would not thin the finished drink. Ordinary 1:1 simple syrup may taste weak in this proportion.
- Fruit acidIn this period usually citric or tartaric acid, either as crystals or in solution. The recipe does not say whether the ounce is by weight or fluid measure, nor the strength of any solution, so the quantity is genuinely ambiguous; add acid a little at a time and taste.
- The 2-or-3-quart rangeThe recipe simply leaves the dilution open, and the reason is not given. Start at 2 quarts of plain syrup to 1 of concentrate and dilute further only if the flavour still reads strong.
- UnitsA quart is 32 fl oz, so the formula makes roughly 3 to 4 quarts of finished syrup, or about 100 to 125 drinks at the standard fountain pour of an ounce or so per glass. Scale down hard for home use.
- ServingDraw about 1 to 1.5 fl oz of syrup into a tall glass and fill with cold carbonated water, stirring only briefly so the gas holds. Chill the syrup first; warm syrup knocks the fizz out of the soda immediately.
- KeepingA saturated sugar syrup with added acid resists spoilage but is not sterile. Bottle it clean, refrigerate, and discard at the first sign of cloudiness or fermentation.
Soda fountain manuals of this kind were written for pharmacists, who dominated the soda-water trade by custom and trade practice and who compounded their flavors the way they compounded medicines: a purchased concentrate, a house stock syrup, and an acid to bring the sweetness into balance. Orange was one of the standard fountain flavors alongside lemon, vanilla, sarsaparilla and raspberry, and "Maltese" signaled the blood orange, a type long associated with Malta and Sicily and generally traced in European cultivation to the Mediterranean citrus trade. The near-total reliance on branded concentrates may be the best clue to the page's date, though the page itself is undated: flavor houses had come to supply fountains at scale, and the druggist's own contribution appears to have shrunk to sugar, water and a dropper of acid.