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Pineapple-Ade
This had a great sale last year in Atlantic City.
Take 1 pint pineapple concentrated syrup, 1 pint orange concentrated syrup, add 8 quarts water, in punch bowl with ice. Add juice 4 lemons. Slice 1 lemon fine and a handful of pieces of pineapple fruit, and float on the top.
A fountain punch scaled for a crowd, written for a dispenser who had commercial syrups on hand. The only real translation needed is what "concentrated syrup" meant behind a 1900s counter.
- Concentrated syrupFountain syrup was a heavy sugar solution, somewhere around one and a half to two parts sugar to one part water by weight depending on the formula, flavoured with fruit juice or extract. Modern bottled snow-cone or Italian-soda syrups are the closest equivalent; fruit juice alone is far thinner and much less sweet, so the punch will taste weak if you substitute it straight across.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups, so this is 2 cups pineapple syrup and 2 cups orange syrup. Eight quarts is 2 gallons of water.
- YieldAbout 2.25 gallons before ice, or roughly thirty-six 8-ounce cups. Halve or quarter it freely; the ratio is 1 part combined syrup to 8 parts water.
- Sweetness is the variableSyrup strengths differ wildly between brands. Mix the syrups with a quart of the water first, taste, then add the rest to reach the sweetness you want rather than dumping in all 8 quarts at once.
- The lemons matterFour lemons' juice in 2 gallons is the whole acid balance of the drink. Without it the punch is flat and cloying; with a heavily sweetened syrup you may want six.
- IceA single large block or a few frozen rings melt slowly and will not water the bowl down over an afternoon. Cubes in this volume dilute noticeably within the hour.
- The floatAdd the sliced lemon and pineapple pieces at the last moment; lemon slices left sitting in punch can turn it bitter as the pith leaches. Either fresh or canned pineapple will do, though softer canned pieces are less likely to sit up on the surface.
This comes from the trade literature of the American soda fountain, a business at its height in the first decades of the twentieth century, when druggists and confectioners competed on syrup formulas and a good seller was worth reporting to the profession by name and place. The Atlantic City reference locates the recipe in a busy warm-weather resort trade. Pineapple was a fashionable flavour precisely then, its price falling as Hawaiian canneries scaled up in the 1900s and 1910s. The punch bowl rather than the glass-by-glass draw suggests this was sold at a special counter or catered event, where a fountain man could show off with fruit floating on top.