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Raspberry Syrup
American Concentrated Raspberry Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 3 quarts; American Fruit Syrup, 1 ounce.
This is a fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: three parts sugar syrup to one part fruit concentrate, plus a small dose of a proprietary flavor booster. It makes a gallon of finished dispensing syrup.
- What the proportions meanOne quart of concentrate to three quarts of plain syrup yields one gallon, a standard fountain batch. Fountain practice generally ran to something like 1 to 1.5 fluid ounces of syrup per 8-ounce glass, drawn with carbonated water, which would take a gallon to roughly 85 to 128 drinks.
- Plain SyrupIn fountain practice this is not a light kitchen simple syrup. It was cut heavy, on the order of a pound or more of sugar to the pint of water, and manuals often specified it by hydrometer, with figures around 30 degrees Baume and upwards. A thin 1:1 syrup will give a watery, weakly sweet soda at these proportions.
- American Concentrated Raspberry SyrupThe capitalised name points to a compounder's product rather than a generic ingredient. Whatever its exact composition, it was evidently a concentrate meant to be cut three to one, and so far stronger than bottled raspberry syrup sold today. Modern raspberry syrups are already at drinking strength, so diluting one 1:3 will leave very little flavour.
- American Fruit SyrupAnother trade preparation, used here at a token one ounce to the gallon, so presumably a corrective or booster rather than a bulk ingredient; the book does not say what it contributed. Acid, usually citric or tartaric, was the common way of giving a fruit soda tartness, and without it a raspberry soda tastes flat and cloying.
- If you want to build it from scratchWork backward: aim for a finished syrup that tastes distinctly too sweet and too strong on its own, since it will be diluted five to seven times by soda water. A squeeze of acid, tasted in, matters more than the exact sugar figure.
- KeepingFountain syrups of this density were shelf-stable for weeks at room temperature by sugar concentration alone, and many commercial concentrates also carried benzoate. A homemade version at lower sugar density should be refrigerated and treated as perishable within a couple of weeks.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were written for druggists, not cooks, which is why the entry reads as a compounding formula with brand-name components and no method at all. By the turn of the twentieth century the American drugstore fountain was a serious commercial concern, and supply houses sold concentrated fruit syrups, foam agents and acid solutions by the gallon so that any operator could reconstitute a consistent product on the spot. Raspberry was one of the fixed staples of the fountain lineup alongside vanilla, lemon, strawberry and sarsaparilla, and it also did duty as a mixer in more elaborate drinks. The reliance on named proprietary preparations is itself a period marker: the book assumes its reader has a trade catalogue at hand, and it makes these formulas nearly impossible to reproduce exactly today.