Cherry Phosphate, the Soda Fountain Cherry Sour
Reader ratingsFresh cherry syrup, cold soda water and acid phosphate added last, stirred in a short glass: the soda fountain’s cherry sour, after Saxe’s dispensers’ guide of 1894.
- Recipe makes
- About 1 1/4 cups cherry syrup, enough for 10 drinks
- Prep
- Cook
- Total
Includes about 30 minutes for the syrup to cool. Each drink then takes a minute.
Cherry phosphate in a tumbler set in a nickel soda-glass holder, with fresh cherries and a long spoon.
The story behind the recipe
Cherry syrup and plain soda water in a short glass, with acid phosphate stirred in at the end and no fizzing head: that was a cherry phosphate, the soda fountain’s cherry sour. The wild cherry phosphate that was the rage in Chicago in 1891 did not taste of the fruit at all. Wild cherry was a bark flavor from the druggist’s shelf, and the oldest printed recipe, Saxe’s of 1894, colors the drink with caramel.
The drink was moving out from Chicago by the summer of 1891. On August 19 the Decatur Morning Review, in central Illinois, told its readers: “Wild cherry phosphate is the latest drink put out by the soda water men. It has been the rage in Chicago for some time. It is a very seasonable drink, and is said to be great for the brain and the nerves.” That was hearsay, the kind of health claim fountain drinks often carried, down to the hot malted milk Saxe recommended for invalids in What Did Soda Fountains Sell in Winter?
Bark and caramel
That recipe is No. 141½ in De Forest W. Saxe’s Saxe’s New Guide, or Hints to Soda Water Dispensers, printed in Chicago in 1894 and headed “Very Fine and a Popular Drink.” It is wild cherry extract, simple syrup and fruit acid, with “Caramel enough to color slightly,” so the glass was a brownish red. The Lemon Egg Phosphate takes the same acid, with an egg shaken in. On the facing page Saxe explains that sour drinks “are served still, like the ‘Ades,’ in mineral glass, but contain beside the Syrup either Phosphate, Lemon Juice, Lime Juice or Lactart.”
Read more about this recipe
The tame cherry
The fruit was waiting in the same book. Saxe made strawberry syrup from fresh berries pressed through flannel and heated with loaf sugar, and noted that cherry syrup was made the same way. Three years later A. Emil Hiss’s Standard Manual of Soda and Other Beverages (Chicago, 1897) gave a separate “tame” cherry phosphate, made from cherry juice and expressly not from wild cherry, and suggested a little raspberry syrup to make it richer. This version is the tame one, with fresh fruit and no bark.
A much older home cherry sour, sharpened with vinegar, is TuneMyRecipe’s Cherry Shrub (opens in a new tab). By 1921 the fountains could buy cherry phosphate syrup ready-made: The Soda Fountain listed it at $3.00 a gallon, about $54 today by US consumer prices. Why a druggist was selling it at all is the question of Was the Soda Fountain a Pharmacy?
WILD CHERRY PHOSPHATE. Very Fine and a Popular Drink. Wild Cherry Extract (B. & C.’s), 4 ozs. ...
Recipe makes: About 1 1/4 cups cherry syrup, enough for 10 drinks
Ingredients
For About 1 1/4 cups cherry syrup, enough for 10 drinks. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for About 1 1/4 cups cherry syrup, enough for 10 drinks.
Cherry syrup
- Pitted cherries, fresh or frozen2 1/2 cups
- Sugar1 cup
Per drink
- Soda water, chilled7 fl oz
- Cherry syrup2 tbsp
- Almond extract (optional)1 drop
- Acid phosphate1/2–1 tsp
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 2 1/2 cups pitted cherries, fresh or frozen
- 1 cup sugar
- 7 fl oz soda water, chilled
- 2 tbsp cherry syrup
- 1 drop almond extract (optional)
- 1/2 to 1 tsp acid phosphate
Equipment
Bowl
Potato masher
Sieve lined with muslin or cheesecloth
Small saucepan
Clean bottle or jar for the syrup
Tumbler
Long spoon
Instructions
For the syrup, put the pitted cherries in a bowl and crush them well with a potato masher.
Tip them into a sieve lined with muslin set over the saucepan, and squeeze the cloth to press out as much juice as you can. Discard the pulp.
Heat the juice over medium heat until it is almost boiling, then take the pan off the heat and stir in the sugar until it has dissolved.
Leave the syrup to cool for about 30 minutes, then pour it into a clean bottle and keep it in the fridge.
For each drink, fill a half-pint tumbler about seven-eighths full with very cold soda water. Add the cherry syrup and the almond extract, if using, then add the acid phosphate last and stir with a long spoon. Serve at once, without ice.
Nutrition
90calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- About 1 1/4 cups cherry syrup, enough for 10 drinks
- Servings
- 10
Estimated from USDA FoodData Central values for granulated sugar and cherry juice, for one drink with 2 tablespoons of the syrup.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
Scale the syrup ingredients together. The drink ingredients are for one glass; multiply them by the number of drinks.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the batch.
Sour or sweet cherries will both do, and frozen ones work as well as fresh once thawed.
Saxe’s wild cherry recipe gives no measure per glass. The amounts here are those of his Cranberry Phosphate (No. 143, p. 84): 7 oz. of soda, 1 oz. of syrup and a teaspoon of phosphate. Saxe’s own fresh-fruit syrup was a concentrate let down with plain syrup before use; this one is a little lighter, with some 20 g of sugar in 2 tbsp.
Wild cherry flavor came from the bark of the American black cherry, Prunus serotina, which US food rules still list as a flavoring source (21 CFR 182.20), and was sold to fountains as an extract made with alcohol. Don’t try to copy it at home. A 1919 wild cherry phosphate syrup in Home Made Beverages calls for oil of bitter almond, which the same rules accept only “free from prussic acid,” that is, hydrogen cyanide: leave it out. One drop of ordinary food-grade almond extract is a modern stand-in if you want a hint of that note.
Acid phosphate goes in last, as Saxe says. Use only a food-grade product sold as a drink ingredient, with its ingredients and dose on the label; such products are a weak solution of phosphoric acid and mineral salts, used at 1/2 to 1 tsp a glass. Phosphoric acid is generally recognized as safe by the FDA when used under good manufacturing practice (21 CFR 182.1073). Laboratory phosphoric acid and the 85 percent concentrate are corrosive and are never a substitute, however much you dilute them.
No acid phosphate in the cupboard? Two teaspoons of fresh lemon juice will sharpen the glass instead, though the lemon shows through the cherry.
Storage
Keep the cherry syrup in a clean, closed bottle in the fridge and use it within a week.
Scaling changes the ingredients only; glassware, ice and timings need their own judgment.
Sources and attribution
De Forest W. Saxe, Saxe’s New Guide, or Hints to Soda Water Dispensers (Chicago: Saxe Guide Publishing, 1894), Nos. 141½–143, pp. 83–84, and No. 163, pp. 92–93; Decatur Morning Review (Decatur, Illinois), August 19, 1891, p. 4
See the original pages (scan at Internet Archive) (opens in a new tab)
Recipe details
- Drink
- Alcohol-freeMocktail
- Drink family
- Sodas & Soft Drinks
- Region
- American
- Era
- 19th century
- Source decade
- 1890s
- Base
- Fruit & juice
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Season
- Summer