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Strawberry Syrup
American Concentrated Strawberry Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 3 quarts; American Fruit Acid, 1 ounce; American Strawberry Color, ¼ ounce. With thousands of customers soda water is apt to taste as the fountain looks.
This is a soda fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: three of the four ingredients are trade goods sold by a supply house, and the whole thing is a dilution scheme for a gallon of finished syrup.
- What it yieldsFour quarts \one one gallon \one of dispensing syrup. Fountain practice was roughly 1 to 1½ fluid ounces of syrup per glass, topped with carbonated water, so a gallon works out at somewhere between about 85 and 130 drinks.
- Plain syrupFountain plain syrup was a heavy simple syrup, commonly somewhere in the region of two parts granulated sugar to one part water by weight, heated only until dissolved and strained; proportions varied between houses. It is denser than a modern 1:1 bar syrup.
- American Concentrated Strawberry SyrupA proprietary flavoring concentrate, not a cooked fruit syrup. The closest current equivalent is a strawberry soda-fountain concentrate or a strong strawberry extract; substituting crushed fruit gives a different, cloudier product that will not keep as well.
- American Fruit AcidA solution of citric or tartaric acid, sometimes both, sold ready-mixed. One ounce in a gallon is a small but deliberate correction — it supplies the tartness that sugar and flavoring alone do not, and without it the drink tastes flat and syrupy.
- American Strawberry ColorA concentrated dye. In this period fountain colors ranged from cochineal to early coal-tar dyes, some of which are no longer permitted in food. Use a current food-grade red coloring and treat the quarter ounce as an upper limit rather than a target.
- Keeping itA syrup at this sugar concentration is fairly stable, but it was made for a fountain turning over gallons weekly. Refrigerate, and expect mold on the surface if it sits for months.
- The closing remarkNot an instruction but an aside: the appearance of the fountain shaped what customers thought they tasted, so a clean, clear-looking syrup mattered commercially.
Books like this one were published for the soda fountain trade, and they read less like cookbooks than like trade manuals: the recipes are formulas, the ingredients are branded products from a single supply house, and the arithmetic is always in quarts and gallons because the dispenser was mixing for a day's business. Strawberry is often said to have been one of the founding fountain flavors alongside vanilla, lemon and sarsaparilla, and the split between a concentrated flavoring, a plain sugar syrup, a separate acid and a separate color shows how thoroughly the drink had been decomposed into purchasable parts. The acid is the telling item: sweetness alone tastes dull without tartness in a cold carbonated drink, so the sourness was dosed in separately and could be adjusted to the flavoring at hand. The aside about soda water tasting as the fountain looks reflects anxieties about the cleanliness of public drinking places.