Home › More Recipes › Chocolate Caramel Milk Shake
Chocolate Caramel Milk Shake
Add to 2/3 glass iced milk 2 to 3 tablespoons chocolate caramel syrup. Mix well and strain into glass.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a dessert: no ice cream is involved, and the whole point is a cold, foamy, thin drink. It stands or falls on the syrup, which the book gives separately.
- The syrup is the recipe"Chocolate caramel syrup" appears to be a preparation assumed to be on hand, most likely given elsewhere in the book rather than bought bottled. Any thick chocolate sauce cooked to a light caramel stage will stand in; a modern squeeze-bottle chocolate syrup is thinner and sweeter, so start at 2 tablespoons and taste.
- What a glass means hereThe recipe assumes a tumbler of the general soda-fountain sort, very roughly 10 to 12 ounces, which would make two-thirds something like 7 to 8 ounces of milk. Sizes were not standardized, so treat this as an estimate; the drink is meant to fill a serving glass once the froth rises.
- "Iced milk" is not ice creamIt means cold whole milk shaken over ice, or milk chilled hard, not the frozen dessert. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim will taste watery against the caramel.
- Mix well means shakeThe instruction to strain implies shaking, presumably in a metal shaker cup, long enough to aerate. A cocktail shaker with a few ice cubes, or ten seconds in a blender, does the same job.
- Why you strainStraining presumably catches ice shards and any undissolved syrup, leaving a smooth drink.
- YieldOne drink. It does not hold: the foam collapses within a few minutes, so shake it to order.
Before the milk shake meant ice cream, it often meant something like this carbonated-era drinks of cold milk shaken with a flavoring syrup until it foamed, though nineteenth-century versions were frequently egg- and spirit-based. The drink belongs to the American drugstore soda fountain, which by the 1920s had a standard vocabulary of syrups kept in pumps along the counter, and household books of the period taught hostesses to reproduce fountain service at home for informal entertaining. Books in the "luncheon and supper guests" mold carried such recipes: a drink that could be assembled in front of company in under a minute from a batch of syrup made in advance. The shift to a thick, ice-cream-based shake is generally traced to the spread of the electric drink mixer and cheap commercial ice cream in the 1920s and 1930s, which is why recipes like this one, thin and shaken and strained, read oddly to a modern eye.