Fruit Cup
Take the juice of half a lemon, one tablespoon each of lime and pineapple juice, four ounces of sugar and half the amount of shaved ice. Fill up the glass with rich milk, shake until foamy and drink at once.
A soda-fountain drink of the shaken-milk type, written for someone standing behind a counter with a syrup rail and an ice shaver. Two things in it need translating before it will work at home.
- Drink it immediately, and mean itThat much lemon and lime juice will start to curdle milk quickly, which is presumably why the recipe says "drink at once." Shake and serve, not shake and set aside.
- The sugar is almost certainly syrupThe sugar may well be syrup -- four ounces of granulated sugar is over half a cup, which would be very sweet in one glass and would not readily dissolve in cold milk. Fountain formulas often counted syrup in fluid ounces, so "four ounces of sugar" may mean simple syrup; the recipe itself does not say.
- "Half the amount" of icePresumably half the volume of the sugar measure, though the recipe does not specify. Shaved rather than cubed ice chills and aerates better in a hand shaker.
- Rich milkWhole milk, or whole milk with a spoonful of cream stirred in. Milk of the period was unhomogenised and often somewhat higher in fat than the modern standard carton; skim milk gives a thin result here.
- Pineapple juiceFresh pineapple juice contains active bromelain, which can add a bitter, slightly prickly edge to dairy; heat-treated canned juice does not. Whether canned juice is what this recipe assumes is not stated.
- Vessel and yieldOne drink. Use a large shaker or a lidded jar with room for the ice, as the mixture gains volume as it foams.
The "fruit cup" here belongs to the American soda fountain rather than the dinner table. Druggists' counters had spent decades building a repertoire of shaken milk drinks, egg drinks and phosphates, partly as respectable alternatives to the saloon during the long temperance agitation, and household magazines reprinted such formulas in terms a home cook could follow -- minus the carbonation tap. The unusual sugar measure may point to a fountain formula rather than a domestic one.