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Tropi-Trin
Make a syrup of 1 dram lemon essence, 1 dram orange essence, 1 dram vanilla extract, 1 ounce American Fruit Acid, enough syrup to make 32 fluid ounces. Draw 1½ ounces of the mixture in a 12-ounce glass and serve foam-ing with coarse and fine streams.
A fountain formula: you compound a flavored syrup in bulk, then draw a small measure of it into a glass and fill with carbonated water. Almost everything that needs translating here is a unit or a druggist's product.
- Drams and ouncesThese are fluid measures. A fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.7 ml or roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon. So the whole 32-ounce batch carries only about 2¼ teaspoons of flavoring in total.
- "Enough syrup"Plain sugar syrup, the fountain's standard stock: sugar dissolved in water, sometimes called simple or rock candy syrup. Proportions varied from manual to manual, from roughly equal weights of sugar and water up to a considerably heavier syrup. Add it to the flavorings until the measure reaches 32 fluid ounces.
- Essences versus extractsIn soda books "essence" of lemon or orange usually means the oil cut with alcohol, generally stronger than a modern supermarket extract, though the terms were used loosely (this recipe calls its vanilla an extract). Substituting a modern lemon extract volume-for-volume may well give a weaker drink.
- American Fruit AcidA proprietary druggist's preparation, generally a solution of citric or tartaric acid in water, sold under trade names by fountain suppliers. Its strength is not given with the formula, so the ounce called for cannot be converted honestly to a weight of modern citric acid; treat the tartness as something to be adjusted by taste.
- The half-ounce drawHalf a fluid ounce of syrup in a 12-ounce glass is lean by fountain practice, where 1 to 1½ ounces was the usual charge. Read it as written if you like, but expect a faint drink.
- Coarse and fine streamsThe fountain's draft arm had two settings. The coarse stream went in first to lift and mix the syrup, the fine stream finished the glass and built the foam. With a home siphon or seltzer bottle, a hard initial squirt followed by a gentle top-up does the same job.
- YieldThe batch makes 32 fluid ounces of syrup, enough for about 64 glasses at the stated half-ounce draw, or around 20 at a more usual ounce and a half.
Soda fountain manuals of the early twentieth century are full of coined names like this one, invented to give a dispenser something new to chalk on the board without buying a new flavor. "Tropi-Trin" suggests the tropics and a trio of flavors, and that is exactly what it is: lemon, orange and vanilla over plain syrup, sharpened with fruit acid. The acid is the point. Sugar syrup and carbonated water alone taste flabby, and fountain operators leaned on acid solutions and acid phosphates to supply the bite that real fruit juice would have given, at a fraction of the cost and with none of the spoilage. The flavorings themselves came from the same wholesale druggists who supplied the pharmacy behind the counter, which is why a book of drinks reads like a dispensing formulary and measures its lemon in drams.