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Violets, Syrup of
This preparation for soda fountains is made by adding a little strong tincture of orris-root to water, rendered clear, or nearly so, by filtration through magnesium carbonate, and dissolving in the flavored water enough sugar to make a syrup. Tincture of grass may be used as a coloring, if a green tint is desired.
A fountain syrup written for a druggist rather than a cook: it assumes you keep tinctures, a filter funnel and a barrel of sugar behind the counter. Nothing here is measured, so treat it as a method and supply your own proportions.
- The flavour is not violetsOrris root is the dried, aged rhizome of Iris germanica or I. pallida, which develops a powdery violet scent (the irone compounds) only after two or more years of curing. Fresh iris rhizome is acrid and does not smell of violets at all.
- Buy food grade, not perfumery gradeMost orris root and orris concrete sold today is for perfumery and potpourri and is not intended to be swallowed. Orris is also a well-documented contact and respiratory sensitiser, so anyone with iris or pollen allergies should leave this alone.
- "Strong tincture" means alcoholA tincture here is a spirit extract, roughly one part dried root to four or five parts of high-proof neutral spirit, macerated for a week or two and strained. "A little" is genuinely undefined; start at a few drops per pint of water and taste, since orris turns soapy fast.
- The magnesium carbonate stepTinctures go cloudy when their resins hit water. Shaking the milky liquid with a spoonful of magnesium carbonate and filtering through paper strips the resin and leaves a clear flavoured water. It is a nineteenth-century pharmacy trick, not a flavour step; a paper coffee filter will stand in for the pharmacy filter paper, but the magnesia is the part doing the work.
- Syrup proportionsFountain syrup of the period was generally close to USP simple syrup, about 850 g of sugar dissolved in enough of the flavoured water to make 1 litre, or roughly 1 lb of sugar per pint of finished syrup. Anything much thinner will not hold up against carbonated water.
- Tincture of grassAn alcoholic extract of green leaves, used for its chlorophyll. It fades to a dull olive in light, and quickly. A drop of blue and red food colouring, or butterfly pea for the blue, gives a more convincing violet than green ever did.
- ServingFountain practice was 1 to 1.5 fl oz of syrup in a glass, filled with carbonated water. A pint of finished syrup is therefore about a dozen drinks.
Violet was a familiar flavour of the late Victorian and Edwardian soda fountain, alongside sarsaparilla, vanilla and lemon, and it reached it by way of the perfumer's bench rather than the kitchen. Real violet flowers yield very little extract and were extremely expensive, so drug-store manuals leaned on orris root, whose cured rhizome carries a scent of the same ionone family and had long been a standby in tooth powders, sachets and hair preparations. That overlap is the point of a book like this one: the American soda fountain was often a department of the pharmacy, run by men who thought in tinctures, filtrations and magnesium carbonate, and who saw no oddity in flavouring a child's drink with a perfumery material. Violet syrup survives today chiefly in the French sirop de violette used in cocktails and in the violet pastilles of Toulouse, many versions of which owe as much to orris and synthetic ionone as to the flower itself.