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Rosebud
Two ounces strawberry juice, 1 ounce rose water, 29 ounces syrup, cochineal coloring to make reddish tint. Serve in usual way.
This is a fountain stock syrup, not a finished drink: the quantities make a quart of flavoring to be dispensed an ounce or so at a time under carbonated water. Everything hinges on treating the 29 ounces of "syrup" as the base it is.
- What "syrup" means herePlain fountain syrup — a heavy simple syrup, made in various proportions in the period books, generally with sugar in excess of the water, sometimes with a few drops of acid solution. It is not maple, corn or flavored syrup.
- Volume, not weightThe ounces are fluid ounces. Two plus one plus twenty-nine gives 32 fl oz, a straight quart — a convenient round batch for a fountain syrup.
- "Serve in usual way"At the fountain this meant roughly 1 to 1.5 oz of syrup drawn into a 10 oz glass, then filled with carbonated water, coarse stream first and fine stream to finish. A quart therefore yields something in the range of 20 to 30 drinks.
- Rose water strength variesModern rose waters run from delicate distillates to concentrated extracts. Add half, taste a diluted sample in soda water, then adjust — over-roses tastes of soap and cannot be pulled back.
- Strawberry juicePress ripe berries and strain through cloth; commercial strawberry "juice" drinks are sweetened and diluted and will throw the balance off. Two ounces in a quart is for aroma and body, not for a strawberry flavor.
- CochinealSold now as carmine or E120, is a dye made from scale insects — still a legal food color but not vegetarian, and a recognized allergen for a small number of people. Beet juice or a red food color does the same job if that matters to your drinkers.
- Keeping itFresh fruit juice in the mix means this has none of the shelf life of a plain syrup. Refrigerate and use within a few days; a fountain went through a jar quickly, a home cook will not.
The soda fountain of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran on stock syrups like this one, mixed by the quart and drawn by the ounce, and the trade books that supplied their formulas leaned heavily on floral and "fancy" names — Rosebud, Violet, Maiden's Blush — for what were often small variations on a fruit syrup. Rose water was the older ingredient by far: it had been a standard flavoring in English and American kitchens since well before vanilla extract became cheap, used in cakes, custards and cordials, and its appearance at the fountain is a survival of that habit rather than an innovation. Cochineal, likewise, was the ordinary red of the nineteenth-century kitchen and confectioner's bench, generally traced to Mexico and traded through Spain, and trade manuals gave recipes for making up the coloring solution. The recipe's brevity — "serve in usual way" — assumes a reader who already knows the motions.