Home › At the Fountain › Raspberry Syrup (American Raspberry Juice quart)
Raspberry Syrup (American Raspberry Juice quart)
American Raspberry Juice, 1 quart; American Fruit Acid, 2 ounces; American Soda Foam, ¾ ounce. Add enough simple syrup to make ½ gallons.
If a 10-pound syrup is used, add 2 pounds sugar, and dissolve in the juice by stirring or by slight heat, but avoid boiling.
This is a fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: it builds a bottled raspberry syrup to be pumped over drawn soda water. Most of the work is translating trade names and trade densities.
- Never boil itThe instruction to dissolve the extra sugar by stirring or gentle warmth and avoid boiling is the hinge. Heat drives off the volatile aroma that makes raspberry taste like raspberry, dulls the color from bright red to brown, and accelerates inversion of the sugar in an already acidified syrup.
- "American" ingredients are brand goodsAmerican Raspberry Juice, American Fruit Acid and American Soda Foam read as proprietary trade names rather than generic descriptions, though the supplier is not named here. Substitute unsweetened raspberry juice or pressed fresh raspberries strained clear, and a food-grade citric or tartaric acid solution.
- Soda FoamFoam solutions of the period were saponin extracts, usually from quillaia (soap bark), sold to give a drawn soda a lasting head. Quillaia extract is still permitted as a food additive within limits; an unlabeled vintage foam preparation is not something to source or use.
- "A 10-pound syrup"Fountain syrups were sold by density, expressed as pounds of sugar per gallon. A 10-pound syrup is lighter than the standard the formula assumes, hence the direction to add 2 pounds of sugar to bring it up. If you are making your own simple syrup, work heavier than 10 pounds of sugar per gallon.
- The yield is ambiguous"Enough simple syrup to make ½ gallons" is almost certainly half a gallon, which is consistent with a quart of juice plus 2 ounces of acid. Read it that way and you finish with 2 quarts.
- Fruit acid quantityTwo ounces of acid solution per half gallon is a fountain-strength sourness meant to be heavily diluted with carbonated water. Tasted straight from the bottle it will seem punishing; judge it only in the finished glass.
- ServingFigure 1 to 1½ fluid ounces of syrup per 8-ounce glass, so this batch draws roughly 40 to 60 sodas. Refrigerate it; at this sugar concentration it keeps for weeks, but the fresh raspberry aroma fades within days.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were half recipe book and half catalogue, written by or for the supply houses that sold the dispensers the syrups and the flavoring stock. That is why the ingredients here carry a brand prefix rather than a description: the reader was expected to have the firm's raspberry juice, fruit acid and foam solution on the back bar and to combine them by formula, much as a pharmacist compounded from a shelf of standard preparations. The overlap was not accidental, since the American soda fountain grew out of the drugstore, and the men mixing these syrups were often licensed druggists working from a dispensatory habit of mind. Raspberry was one of the staple fruit flavors of the trade alongside strawberry, lemon and vanilla.