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Tonic Hypophosphites
Syrup Hypophosphites Lime and Soda, 4 ounces; Vanilla Syrup, 28 ounces. Mix.
There is as much difference between the soda of different stores as between the roast beef of different restaurants.
This is a fountain dispensing syrup rather than a drink in itself: an ounce or so would be drawn into a glass and filled with carbonated water. It cannot be reproduced today, because its defining ingredient is a nineteenth-century pharmaceutical preparation and not a food.
- Why it fails: hypophosphites are not a food ingredientSyrup of Hypophosphites of Lime and Soda was an official pharmacy preparation carrying calcium and sodium hypophosphite, salts used medicinally and, later, industrially as reducing agents. They are not permitted or recognised as food additives, and no current fountain or kitchen ingredient corresponds to them. A modern soda syrup recipe should be used instead.
- No dose controlThe original syrup was compounded to a stated strength per fluid ounce and generally taken by the teaspoon or tablespoon. Diluting it into a bulk sweetener and serving free-pour glasses of it over a counter divorces an active medicinal salt from any dose at all.
- The unitsThe quantities are presumably fluid ounces, and the whole thing scales as one part medicated syrup to seven parts vanilla syrup. The batch comes to 32 ounces, one quart, which at an ounce or so of syrup per glass would be a couple of dozen glasses or more.
- Vanilla syrup then and nowFountain vanilla syrup of the period was a heavy simple syrup, roughly two parts sugar to one of water by weight, flavoured with vanilla extract and sometimes a little caramel colour. Commercial bottled vanilla syrups today are not necessarily comparable in strength.
- The closing remarkThe line about roast beef is the compiler's editorial aside rather than part of the formula, and appears to be about the variable quality of the soda served: fountain "soda" could differ from shop to shop with the charging, the water, and the state of the apparatus.
Syrup of hypophosphites was one of the great tonics of the second half of the nineteenth century, sold both as an official pharmacopoeial preparation and as a proprietary one, and generally traced to the British physician J. F. Churchill, who in the 1850s promoted hypophosphite salts as a treatment for consumption; Fellows' Syrup of Hypophosphites and a crowd of imitators kept the idea alive in druggists' shops for decades. Because the American soda fountain grew up inside the drugstore, its counter stocked the same shelf of medicinal syrups as the dispensing bench, and "tonic" drinks like this one sat on the menu beside chocolate and lemon phosphates as a way of selling a prescription ingredient by the glass. The genre faded in the twentieth century amid the gradual professional retreat from hypophosphite therapy, leaving behind only the vocabulary: the phosphates and tonics that survive on soda menus now carry no medicine in them at all.