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Wild Cherry Syrup (III)
American Wild Cherry Juice, 1 quart; American Fruit Acid, 2 ounces; American Soda Foam, ¾ ounce. Add enough simple syrup to make 11/½ gallons.
If a 10-pound syrup is used, dissolve 2 pounds sugar in the juice, by stirring or by slight heat, but avoid boiling. Every store sells soda nowadays. Competition has taught people to expect pure soda from a fine fountain.
This is a fountain formula, written for a druggist who bought his flavoring bases by the brand name from a supply house. Most of the work of modernizing it is figuring out what those brands were and what stands in for them.
- The trade names are house products"American" here is a supplier's brand, not a description. American Fruit Acid was a standardized solution of citric and/or tartaric acid in water; American Soda Foam was a saponin-based foaming extract, usually quillaia (soap bark) or yucca. Neither is available under those names.
- Substituting the fruit acidThe strength of the commercial solution is not stated anywhere in the recipe, so no exact conversion follows from the text; two fluid ounces of it may well have carried more acid than a teaspoon of powder. Use powdered citric acid dissolved in a little hot water and add to taste, judging by the finished drink rather than the syrup.
- Substituting the foamFoam extract exists only to make the drawn soda hold a head. Food-grade quillaia extract is still sold for this purpose and is used in tiny amounts; a modern gum arabic or foaming bitters can also serve. Left out entirely, the syrup tastes the same and simply looks flatter in the glass.
- The yield is a typoThe yield looks like a typo — "11/½ gallons" is most likely 1½ gallons; a quart of juice with two pounds of sugar suits that proportion far better than 11½ gallons would. Read it as 1½ gallons of finished syrup.
- "A 10-pound syrup"Fountain syrups were sold by density, meaning pounds of sugar per gallon. A 10-pound syrup is lighter than the standard heavy stock, which is why the recipe tells you to make up the difference by dissolving 2 pounds of sugar directly into the cherry juice.
- Why not to boilHeat drives off the volatile aromatics that make wild cherry taste of wild cherry and can darken the juice from clear red toward muddy. The recipe asks only for "slight heat"; warm it just enough to take the sugar into solution, or stir it in cold and be patient.
- Sourcing the juiceCommercial "wild cherry" fountain flavor of this era was frequently an infusion of wild cherry bark rather than pressed fruit, which is why the flavor is drier and more almond-like than modern cherry syrup. If you use actual fruit, sour or morello cherries come closest; sweet cherries make something insipid.
- Serving proportionFountain practice was roughly 1 to 1½ fluid ounces of syrup per 8-ounce glass, topped with carbonated water. A gallon and a half therefore runs to well over a hundred drinks — divide the whole thing by six for a manageable quart.
Wild cherry was one of the anchor flavors of the American soda fountain precisely because it came out of the pharmacy: syrup of wild cherry bark (Prunus serotina) was a standard officinal preparation, used as a vehicle to mask bitter medicines and as a cough remedy in its own right, and the druggist already had it on the shelf when he installed his marble counter. That the book prints three separate wild cherry formulas suggests how much demand there was, and how much variation in what suppliers were selling. The closing lines are the giveaway about the period: by the time this was written, soda had stopped being a druggist's specialty and become a commodity sold in every store, so the fountain trade sold itself on purity and finish instead — hence the foam extract, whose only job is to make the glass look right.}