Recipes for things to drink

I've been doing a few more beverages lately. After making your own you realize just how bland and nasty most mass-produced soda really is.

There are a few standouts. The local pizza chain Hot Lips makes its own fruit sodas. Water, juice, sugar, vanilla, and that's it. For the most part the commercial product is nasty.

I've found a few more good books. The definitive guide is The Dispenser's Formulary: 2500 Tested Recipes. The Formulary was the early 20th century standard for soda jerks from extracting essences to making sandwiches to twenty nine varieties of banana split. Thumbing through it gives you an idea of how far much craft we've lost.

Other favorites include John Hull Brown's 1966 Early American Beverages, Alice Cook Brown's Early American Herb Recipes and Helen Watkey's Prohibition era On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon: 500 Recipes for Delicions Drinks Which Can be Made at Home. A stroll through Google Books turns up dozens. Beverage, brewing and distillery books are obvious choices. Old cookbooks included many more potables than we use today. Some of them are a bit odd. Some are excellent.

The real surprise were confectionary and parfumerie manuals. It should be obvious that , brewing, cooking, candy-making and perfume overlap. It's not apparent centuries later just how much they did. Parfumiers made pastilles. Confectioners made drinks. Cooks dabbled in both crafts. Households had still-rooms. In many ways recent research in food pairings such as the VCF database are a a more scientifically rigorous return to this tradition.

A couple of more recent books of note are Cindy Renfrow's A Sip Through Time: A Collection of Old Brewing Recipes and Darcy O'Neill's Fix the Pumps.

ASTT is a historical survey of beverages with recipes from Ancient Greek Hypocras to 18th century brandies and syllabubs. The variety of recipes is astounding. Some of them are a bit difficult to decipher. Many of them are excellent. Some, like egg, milk and wine drink which starts with milking your cow directly into the pot in front of the guests require a little creative modification. Most important, Ms. Renfrow is trained as a botanist. She untangles the archaic and sometimes contradictory plant names and provides systematic designations, basic botany and traditional uses. Most importantly, she gives clear warnings about ingredients which we now know to be dangerous.

Darcy O'Neill is more bartender than scientist. His researches into cocktails and beverages have led him down some very interesting byways including Fix the Pumps. The book  is part history of the soda fountain and manual with recipes and isntructions in the basic skills of the soda jerk. His company Extinct Chemical sells the book along with Acid Phosphate and Lactart solutions, essential ingredients for many older recipes.

Those who are interested in stronger drink should look at the Amphora Society, supplier and information resource for the small distilling industry. They publish Volodmir Pavliuchuk's Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to the Ardent Spirits of the World. Cordial Waters includes dozens of recipes for distilled and infused alcoholic drinks from Cossack Tobacco Vodka to Huile de Venus, Sir Walter Raleigh's Grand Cordial, Uisgebeagh and a concoction which starts with five liters of neutral spirits and four tablespoons of large black ants.