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Plum Syrup (American Plum Extract ounces)
American Plum Extract, 2 ounces; Simple Syrup, 1 gallon; American Fruit Acid, 2 ounces; American Sarsaparilla Color, 1 ounce.
This is a fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: a concentrate to be pumped into a glass and topped with carbonated water. Almost every ingredient is a trade product from a flavoring house, so the useful work is in translating the brand names into what they actually were.
- It contains no plums"American Plum Extract" was almost certainly a proprietary trade flavoring rather than anything pressed, cooked or strained from a plum, and likely contained little or no actual fruit.
- Simple syrup at fountain strengthSoda-fountain simple syrup was much heavier than a 1:1 bar syrup, made close to saturation. A 1:1 bar syrup will taste thin and watery when cut with soda water at these dosing rates.
- American Fruit AcidA trade name for a dilute solution of citric or tartaric acid, used to give the tartness that a sugar syrup and an oil-based flavor cannot supply on their own. The quantity is meaningless without knowing the strength of that particular solution, which this page does not give.
- Sarsaparilla ColorA caramel coloring, sold under that name for its use in darkening sarsaparilla. The one ounce called for here is there to give the syrup a reddish-brown depth, not to add flavor.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesOunces here are most likely fluid ounces, extracts, acids and colors generally having been sold and measured by liquid measure at the fountain. Two ounces in a gallon is roughly 1.5 percent by volume.
- Yield and dosingOne gallon is 128 fluid ounces. At a fountain pump shot of 1 to 1.5 ounces per glass, that is roughly 85 to 128 drinks, each finished with carbonated water.
- Keeping itA syrup this sweet and this acidic resists spoilage well, but period fountains also relied on benzoate of soda as a preservative and on drawing down a gallon quickly. A batch of this size made at home would want refrigeration.
Books like this one sat somewhere between cookbook and trade literature, issued by flavoring manufacturers and circulated among druggists who ran a soda fountain. The fountain was a fixture of the American drugstore from the 1870s through the middle of the twentieth century, and the man behind the marble counter was expected to compound his own syrups by the gallon from concentrates rather than buy them finished. Fruit-named syrups of this kind were rarely fruit; the "plum" was an aroma tinted with caramel to look the part, and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was aimed in part at exactly this gap between a label and its contents. The recipe is a small record of how industrial flavor chemistry reached the public first through the drugstore counter, one nickel glass at a time.