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Wild Strawberry Phosphate
A Prize Winner.
Syrup Strawberry (from juice), 6 pints; Syrup Lemon, 1 pint; Fresh infusion Wild Cherry, 1 pint; Acid Tartaric, 2½ drams. Dissolve the acid in the infusion, and add, with the lemon syrup, to the syrup of strawberry. Serve, without foam, in thin mineral glasses.
This is a soda-fountain dispensing formula rather than a domestic recipe: a gallon-scale batch of finished syrup, drawn an ounce or two at a time and topped with carbonated water at the counter. It cannot be recommended today, and the reason is the wild cherry.
- The wild cherry infusion is the problemInfusions of wild cherry bark (Prunus serotina) contain prunasin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the plant tissue is wetted and its enzymes go to work. The nineteenth-century pharmacopoeias specified a cold infusion for precisely that reason — the released hydrocyanic acid was the point, and it was what gave the preparation its flavour and its sedative reputation.
- "Fresh infusion" is not a measurementThe recipe gives no bark weight, no water volume, no steeping time and no age or source for the bark. Glycoside content in wild cherry bark varies widely with season, part of the tree and storage, so there is no way to know what a pint of anyone's infusion actually contains. A formula that a dispensing pharmacist worked from a standard USP monograph is not a formula a modern reader can reconstruct safely.
- It was drunk cold and in quantityIt was drunk cold -- Nothing here is heated, and the batch is made up in gallon quantity to be drawn off by the glass. Whatever the infusion carries goes into the drink unchanged. If you want a strawberry phosphate, use a current recipe.
- "Phosphate" here is a misnomerGenuine fountain phosphates were soured with acid phosphate, a dilute phosphoric acid solution supplied to soda men. This prize-winning formula uses tartaric acid instead, which gives a sharper, more fruit-like tartness.
- Apothecary unitsA dram is an eighth of an apothecary ounce, roughly 3.9 grams, so 2½ drams is just under 10 grams of acid to a gallon of syrup. "Thin mineral glasses" means the light, thin-blown glasses used at the counter, not heavy pressed tumblers.
- "Serve without foam"An instruction to the dispenser: the drink was to be drawn so that it stayed clear and the fruit character was not buried under carbonic froth.
American soda fountains grew directly out of the drugstore, and formulas like this one show it: the dispenser at the marble counter was a pharmacist or his apprentice, working from the same shelves of tinctures, infusions and syrups he used to fill prescriptions. Wild cherry bark was a staple of that shelf, official in the United States Pharmacopoeia as a syrup and long valued as a cough remedy and bitter flavouring, and it drifted onto the fountain menu because it tasted good and because it was already in the building. "Prize winner" is the title the formula carries on the page, whatever it may once have referred to. The distinction between a phosphate, a lemonade and a plain fruit soda was largely a matter of which acid did the souring tartaric drink could still be sold, and awarded a prize, as a phosphate.