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Chocolate Milk Shake
1/4 cup finely crushed ice, 2 tablespoons Chocolate Syrup, 1/2 cup milk, 1/4 cup Apollinaris water or soda water drawn from syphon. Put ice in tumbler, add remaining ingredients, and shake until well mixed. Serve with or without whipped cream, sweetened and flavored.
A soda-fountain drink from the era when "milk shake" meant a shaken, aerated drink rather than blended ice cream. It comes together in under a minute once you have the syrup.
- Chocolate SyrupThe capitalised name points to a separate recipe elsewhere in the book, presumably cocoa or grated chocolate cooked with sugar and water to a pourable syrup. Any unsweetened cocoa syrup works; commercial squeeze-bottle syrup is thinner and sweeter, so use a little less.
- Apollinaris waterA German bottled mineral water, naturally carbonated, sold widely in America around 1900 as a fountain mixer. Plain seltzer or club soda is the direct substitute; a mineral-heavy sparkling water gets you closer to the original taste.
- Crushed ice"Finely crushed" means shaved or chipped, not cubes. Cubes will not mix in a tumbler and will dilute unevenly. Pulse ice briefly in a food processor or crush it in a towel with a rolling pin.
- Shaking, not blendingThe method aerates rather than pulverises: shake hard in a covered tumbler or cocktail shaker until well mixed, as the recipe says. A blender breaks up the ice and gives you something watery rather than foamy.
- Add the soda lastThe recipe adds ice first, then all the remaining ingredients together, and shakes until well mixed. If you want to keep more fizz you can combine syrup and milk first and add the soda water at the end, though shaking will drive off much of the carbonation either way.
- YieldAbout one cup of liquid plus ice, so a single small drink by modern standards. Double it for a full glass.
- The whipped cream"Sweetened and flavored" means sugar and a flavouring, most likely vanilla, whipped into heavy cream and spooned on top rather than stirred in.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, a chocolate firm dating to the eighteenth century and among the oldest in the United States, issued promotional recipe booklets of this kind, though the source of this particular page is not established here. Booklets like that were free advertising that doubled as instruction: they taught households to use cocoa and baking chocolate in the same ways the commercial soda fountains did, and fountain drinks feature heavily. The shaken chocolate milk with soda water belongs to that fountain tradition rather than to the thick ice-cream shake, which came later, once electric drink mixers and reliable freezers were common. The call for Apollinaris water by name suggests a date in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when imported German mineral water was a fashionable mixer in American cities.