Home › Menu VII › Chocolate Float
Chocolate Float
Put 2 tablespoons chocolate syrup in tall glass and fill with Ice-cold rich milk. Shake thoroughly, add a Spoonful of frozen chocolate and serve immediately.
A two-line soda-fountain drink that assumes you already have chocolate syrup and chocolate ice cream on hand. The only real decisions are proportion and temperature.
- "Frozen chocolate"Most likely chocolate ice cream, or a frozen chocolate mixture of that kind, in the fountain vocabulary of the period. The recipe says only "a spoonful"; a modest scoop that floats rather than fills the glass fits the sense.
- Chocolate syrupSyrups vary in sweetness and thickness from brand to brand, then and now. Start with the 2 tablespoons called for, taste, and adjust rather than assuming a modern squeeze bottle matches.
- "Rich milk"Before standardized milkfat grades, this meant whole milk with the cream still in it. Whole milk works; a tablespoon or two of half-and-half in the glass gets closer to the original body.
- Shake thoroughlyDo the shaking before the ice cream goes in, or the float collapses. A cocktail shaker or a lidded jar, ten seconds, is enough to disperse the syrup — an unshaken glass leaves a sludge of syrup at the bottom.
- Temperature is the whole dishThe milk must be genuinely ice-cold. Warm milk dissolves the scoop instead of floating it, and the drink turns to thin chocolate milk within a minute.
- Glass and yieldThe recipe specifies only a "tall glass" and makes one serving. Leave an inch of headroom for the ice cream and any foam.
Alice Bradley's For Luncheon and Supper Guests belongs to a run of 1920s American entertaining manuals aimed at the hostess putting together light informal meals, and a fountain drink slotted into a luncheon menu was very much of its moment. The soda fountain had become a fixture of American drugstores through the late nineteenth century, and by the 1920s — with saloons closed under Prohibition — the fountain was often said to be among the usual places to buy a cold drink, which pushed floats, sundaes and malteds into home menus as respectable refreshment. The word "float" simply describes the technique: a scoop of ice cream set on top of a cold liquid rather than blended into it, distinguishing it from a milkshake.