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Strawberry Syrup (III)
American Strawberry Juice, 1 quart; American Fruit Acid, 2 ounces; American Soda Foam, ¾ ounce. Add enough simple syrup to make 11½ gallons.
If 10-pound syrup is used, dissolve 2 pounds sugar in the syrup by stirring or by slight heat, but avoid boiling. Equal parts raspberry and pineapple juices make an excellent substitute for strawberry juice, the blend producing a fine flavor, similar to the juice of wild strawberries.
This is a soda fountain formula written for a dispenser working at commercial scale, not a home batch. The proportions are sound but the ingredients are proprietary trade goods and the yield is enormous.
- The scaleEleven and a half gallons is roughly 1,470 fluid ounces of finished syrup, or something like a thousand sodas at the 1 to 1½ ounces per glass a fountain man would draw. Divide by 46 for a single quart of syrup: about 1½ tablespoons of strawberry juice, a bit over a gram of acid, and half a gram of foam — small enough that at home it is easier to work in gallons or not at all.
- "10-pound syrup"Fountain syrups were graded by the weight of sugar reckoned to the gallon; a 10-pound syrup is at the thinner end of the range. The recipe accordingly tells you to dissolve 2 pounds of sugar into the syrup to bring the strength up, though it does not say whether that is per gallon or for the batch. Thinner syrup is generally the less stable in keeping.
- American Fruit AcidA trade name for a solution of citric or tartaric acid, sold ready-mixed by the flavor houses. The concentration was never printed on the label and cannot be recovered from the recipe, so no honest conversion to grams of citric acid powder exists. Add acid to taste instead, in small increments, aiming for a syrup that tastes sharp on its own.
- American Soda FoamA foaming agent, usually based on an extract of quillaia (soap bark), added so the drawn soda would carry a head; other period foams used albumen or gums. Quillaia extract is still permitted in non-alcoholic beverages and is sold to bartenders as foamer; the quantity here works out to about 0.05 percent.
- Do not boilThe instruction to dissolve the extra sugar with "slight heat, but avoid boiling" is the hinge. Heat hard enough and you risk driving off volatile aromatics and beginning to invert the sugar. Warm gently and stir only until the sugar is dissolved.
- The substitutionEqual parts raspberry and pineapple juice for strawberry is given in the recipe itself and is worth trying; the pineapple appears to be there for aroma rather than sweetness. Use unsweetened juices, since the sugar is accounted for by the syrup.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative in the formula and no pasteurization step. A fountain turned over its syrups in days; a home batch should be refrigerated and treated as fresh juice, or frozen in portions.
The American Soda Book belongs to a genre of trade manuals published for the soda fountain business in the decades either side of 1900, when the dispenser was a skilled tradesman working from formula books much as a pharmacist worked from a formulary — unsurprising, since the fountain usually stood in a drugstore. The ingredients here, all carrying the "American" prefix, are the supply house's own branded goods. Strawberry was among the fountain's familiar fruit syrups, and the closing note about wild strawberry flavor is often taken to reflect a loss the period felt keenly: cultivated varieties bred for size and shipping had displaced the small, intensely aromatic wild berry.