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Tea Syrup (Green Tea ounces Black Tea)
Green Tea, 4 ounces; Black Tea, 4 ounces; Soda Foam, 1 ounce; Granulated Sugar, 6 lbs. Boiling water, a sufficient quantity.
Place the tea in a suitable vessel, pour upon it 3 pints of boiling water, cover up tightly, macerate until cool, express and set aside. Repeat the operation twice, using the same tea and quantity of boiling water each time. Then mix the three expressed liquids and evaporate to 4 pints. In this solution dissolve the sugar at boiling point, strain, and when cool add the liquid foam.
This is a pharmacy-style concentrate meant to be dosed into a glass of carbonated water, not a beverage to drink as it stands. The proportions are commercial: it makes roughly five pints of very heavy syrup.
- Macerate until cool, not hot-brewThe three-pint infusions are poured boiling and then left covered until cold, which is the hinge of the recipe. Long standing at falling temperature pulls out colour and body without the harsh, hot-held tannin bite you would get from holding it near boiling.
- "Express" means press the leavesAfter each maceration, squeeze or press the wet leaves to recover the liquid held in them. Wringing them in muslin gets a noticeably darker, stronger extract than simply draining.
- Soda foamA fountain foaming agent of the period, usually a solution of quillaia (soap bark) extract, sometimes egg albumen or gum. It is no longer a retail item; the syrup works without it, you simply lose the head on the finished drink. Note that the recipe adds it only after the syrup has cooled, though it does not say why.
- UnitsThe tea is by weight: on avoirdupois ounces that is about 115 g each, 230 g in total (apothecaries' ounces would give rather more). On US liquid measure, three pints is 6 cups and the finished 4 pints is 2 quarts of concentrated infusion before the sugar goes in.
- The reductionNine pints of infusion boiled down to four is a long evaporation and it will cost you most of the tea aroma while concentrating the tannin. Keep it at a bare simmer in a wide pan rather than a hard boil, and expect the reduced liquid to be almost black and quite astringent.
- Sugar densitySix pounds of sugar into 4 pints of liquid is a very heavy syrup, though short of full saturation. Dissolve at boiling point as directed and stir until no grit remains on the pan bottom, or the syrup may throw crystals in storage.
- Yield and useDissolved sugar adds a great deal of volume, so the finished syrup comes to roughly 7 1/2 pints. Figure 1 to 1 1/2 fluid ounces per 8-ounce glass, topped with cold carbonated water; lemon was a common companion at the fountain.
- KeepingAt this sugar concentration the syrup keeps well, but it is not sterile. Bottle it into clean bottles (the foam must go in cold, so it cannot be bottled hot once compounded), refrigerate once opened, and discard if it goes cloudy or ropy.
Soda fountains in the United States were an extension of the drugstore, and books like this one were written for pharmacists who compounded beverages with the same vocabulary they used for medicines: macerate, express, evaporate, quantities in avoirdupois ounces and pounds. Tea syrup belongs to the era's large family of non-alcoholic fountain drinks that grew alongside the temperance movement, and it let a fountain serve a cold tea drink year-round from a shelf-stable concentrate rather than brewing to order. The popularity of iced tea in America is often traced to the 1904 St. Louis exposition, though that story is traditional rather than documented, and chilled tea was being drunk well before it. The blend of green and black leaf in equal weight reflects American tea buying of the period, when green teas from China and Japan still held a large share of the market before black Indian and Ceylon teas took it over.