Life goes on teaching me things when I least expect it, which is Life’s normal teaching method. A couple of days ago I encountered the phrase “beverage sauce”.
This is not a new phrase; perhaps you knew about it. This is a serum, or potion, or what-have-you, which can, in this case, be stirred into any beverage to give it that special seasonal Pumpkin Spice flavor. I also learned that we call these two months in autumn “Spooky Season” because pumpkin spice sneaks up on you wherever you least expect it.
I suppose this is preferable to the old word “creamer” because Americans tend to put creamer only in coffee, whereas a beverage sauce can be tossed into your milk, your 7-Up, your Smart Water, or whatever you please. (I have suddenly experienced a desire to find out what it would taste like to add pumpkin spice beverage sauce to one of those banana flavored smart milks. Spooky Season, indeed: didn’t even see that one coming.)
HOWEVER, as a card-carrying member of the Irrelevant Generation, I should like to point out that the whole ‘beverage sauce’ concept is not new. We ALSO had something we had around the house that would instantly change the flavor of any beverage if we just managed to sneak it past our parents (and since we had to stir using a metal spoon in a drinking glass made of glass, this was fraught with suspense.)
We called it Hershey’s Syrup.
Hershey’s Syrup, in those antediluvian days, was available only in small tin cans, which had to be opened with a can opener: the type otherwise used, as far as I can recall, only for cans of evaporated milk or beer. This was NOT a problem for the experimental youngster: once a can of Hershey’s Syrup had the two openings in the top (one to let the air in so the syrup could pour out the other: we learned our science in them days without having to read our textbooks by the firelight) the can sat forever in the refrigerator, open to anyone who wanted to bother. The only deterrent was the fact that sitting in the fridge made the syrup get thicker and harder to pour.
Some other time I will tell the sad story of the hot fudge sundae in our house. These were rare treats because to make hot fudge, the can of Hershey’s Syrup had to be heated in a saucepan of water on the stove. Too much trouble. So was the plastic package of Hershey’s Syrup that could be heated in the pan of hot water. And, later, the plastic package that had to be heated in the microwave. At this point, the world owes me something like a hundred hot fudge sundaes.
COLD Hershey’s Syrup, however, could be poured into milk and then stirred ferociously until the milk was a creamy chocolate. But was this enough for the scientifically intrigued grade schooler who had pioneered the concept of pouring maple syrup from the little pitcher onto vanilla ice cream? NAY! It merely raised the curtain.
There is no time to go through ALL the experiments which resulted (or the maternal exclamations). To summarize: mixing Hershey’s Syrup in water is pointless. Mixing Hershey’s Syrup AND a healthy heap of Tang into milk was amazing. Hershey’s Syrup and Grape Kool-Aid would never catch on. Mixing Hershey’s Syrup into water with a handful of those individually wrapped blue mints did very little good. (Nothing improved the flavor of those blue mints, which dominated the Candy Drawer those last few days before payday. Who made those things? Translucent blue, shaped like elongated Werther’s Originals, and as pretty as they were uninteresting to consume.)
But the world moves along, and my parents were lured into purchasing Nestle’s Quik (now Nesquik). This was MUCH easier to mix in, but, as a powder, does not belong in the category of beverage sauce. And, as mentioned, Hershey’s Syrup was replaced in our refrigerator by chocolate in jars or plastic packets. I do not know what year my parents finally discarded that last can, its triangular gouges still decorated with driblets of petrified chocolate. It may have lasted until the current century, or maybe it still exists, still fastened to the old discarded refrigerator by hard chocolate paste on the shelf.
Anyway, the whole point is that we DID have beverage sauces in my day, and it was a boon to the scientific impulses of small children. If only we had had the backing of our elders (and a billion dollar ad campaign) WE might have come up with our own seasonal flavors and retired before we reached the point of having to study long division. (I still think there’s a place in modern commerce for my brother’s lemon-lime chocolate flavor. This was a springtime sensation, and, instead of Hershey’s syrup, used Lemon-Lime Shasta as a sauce for hollow chocolate Easter eggs. I don’t recall what this tasted like, but the resulting mess made a few squiggles of Hershey’s Syrup on the kitchen floor pale in comparison.)
