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Orgeat Syrup (American Orgeat Extract I dram)
American Orgeat Extract I dram or tablespoonful, 60 drops; Simple Syrup, 1 gallon; American Soda Foam, ½ ounce. Sarsparilla color to suit.
Remember that women like a little more syrup and three times as much foam and froth as men like. Never overflow a glass.
This is a bulk formula from behind the counter, meant to fill a gallon jar that a dispenser draws from all day. Scaled down and read carefully, it still works, but two of its three ingredients are trade goods rather than groceries.
- The dram is contradictoryA fluid dram is about 1/8 fl oz, roughly 3.7 ml, and 60 drops (minims) matches that almost exactly. A tablespoonful is four times as much. Take the dram-and-60-drops figure as the intended dose and treat "tablespoonful" as loose counter shorthand; if you want a stronger syrup, add flavoring by taste rather than by the larger reading.
- Scaling to a sane batchOne gallon of simple syrup is 128 fl oz. For a quart, use about 15 drops of almond (orgeat) extract, which is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, and adjust upward from there. Commercial extracts vary enormously in strength, so build it in stages and taste.
- Simple syrup at fountain strengthSoda fountain simple syrup was generally heavier than the 1:1 syrup common today, often somewhere in the region of 1.5 to 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight. A 1:1 syrup will taste weak in a carbonated glass.
- American Soda FoamA proprietary foaming extract, generally based on saponins from quillaia (soap bark) or yucca, sold to fountains to give a lasting head. It is not a domestic ingredient and should not be improvised from soap-bark preparations of unknown concentration. For home use, leave it out, or froth the drink with a little egg white or aquafaba shaken separately.
- Sarsaparilla colorA coloring bottle sold by the fountain trade under the name of the drink it usually tinted; such colors were generally caramel-based. Almond orgeat is traditionally milky white or pale, so the browning here is purely cosmetic and can be skipped entirely.
- Serving proportionFountain practice was about 1 to 1 1/2 fl oz of syrup in the glass, then carbonated water drawn onto it and stirred. A gallon of finished syrup therefore yields roughly 85 to 125 drinks.
- The line about women and menA sales instruction, not a formula. It reflects the trade's assumptions about customers' tastes, and can be ignored; the useful half of the sentence is the last one, since an overflowing glass wastes syrup.
Orgeat takes its name from the French orgeat, from orge, barley: the ancestor of the drink was a medieval barley water, and almonds later displaced the grain, after which the almond-and-orange-flower syrup became the standard. "American Orgeat Extract" was a manufactured flavoring bought by the dram, sold alongside "American Soda Foam" and coloring bottles by soda-fountain supply houses. That is why the entry reads as a dispensing spec rather than a cooking method, and why the closing advice is about the customer and the glass rather than about the syrup: the flavor arrived premixed in a bottle.