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Vienna Cream
Simple Syrup, 1 1½ gallons; American Soda Foam, 4 ounces; American Sicilian Lemon Extract, 3 ounces; American Extract Vanilla, ½ ounce; White Glycerin, 1 pint. Place in a 10-gallon fountain, fill with water, and charge to 140 pounds' pressure. Draw a 10-ounce tumbler half full of Vienna Cream, add 1 ounce any flavored syrup desired, and fill with soda water, using large stream, and stir with a spoon. Remember that women like a little more syrup and three times as much foam and froth as men like. Never overflow a glass.
This is a bulk fountain formula from the soda trade, not a household drink: it makes a foaming base by the ten gallons, which is then drawn against flavored syrup and carbonated water. Most of the work in adapting it is figuring out what the proprietary bottled products were and scaling the whole thing down by a factor of a hundred.
- The syrup quantity is ambiguous"Simple Syrup, 1 1½ gallons" is almost certainly a typesetting slip for 1½ gallons, though it could be read as "1 to 1½." The base is diluted to fill a 10-gallon fountain, so on the 1½-gallon reading the finished mix is roughly one part syrup to six parts water.
- American Soda FoamA proprietary foaming compound sold to fountain operators, typically built on saponin extract of quillaia (soap bark) and sometimes egg albumen. Quillaia extract is still permitted as a beverage foaming agent in small amounts and is sold for cocktail use; egg white or aquafaba will foam but will not hold under a carbonated stream the way the trade product did.
- White glycerinFood-grade vegetable glycerin, used here for body and a faint sweetness rather than flavor. A pint in ten gallons is about 1.25 percent, which reads as mouthfeel and nothing more. Buy it labeled food grade.
- The lemon extract is very strong"Sicilian lemon extract" in fountain supply catalogs meant oil of lemon cut with alcohol, far more concentrated than modern baking extract. Three ounces in ten gallons of finished soda is a light background note; if you substitute supermarket lemon extract expect a duller, more alcoholic result, and consider fresh lemon oil instead.
- 140 pounds of pressureThat is the charge for a period fountain's carbonator, not a number to reproduce with improvised equipment. A modern soda siphon or countertop carbonator working at its own rated pressure gives comparable carbonation; never pressurize a vessel that is not built and tested for it.
- YieldTen gallons of base at five ounces a glass is roughly 250 drinks.
- "Large stream"Fountain taps had a coarse stream and a fine one. The coarse stream was used deliberately here to knock the foaming base into froth as the glass filled; a gentle pour will give you a flat, sweetish soda instead.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were trade literature, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the cook at home, and they doubled as advertising for the supply house whose bottled compounds they named in every formula. "Vienna Cream" belongs to a family of turn-of-the-century foam sodas — cream sodas, egg phosphates, velvet and marshmallow drinks — that had no dairy in them at all; "cream" described the thick head and the smooth body that glycerin and saponin foam produced. The Viennese label was most likely pure atmosphere, borrowing the prestige of the coffeehouse and its whipped-topped drinks for an American soft drink, though nothing in the record establishes the motive for the name. The aside about what women and men prefer is worth noticing as period evidence: fountain manuals routinely coached dispensers on reading customers, and the soda fountain was one of the few public refreshment counters where respectable women could sit unaccompanied, which made them a commercially important audience.