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Beverages: Ching
Ching Ching.
Fill a glass two thirds full of shaved ice; add 3 or 4 lumps of sugar, the juice of a large orange, and a few drops of essence of cloves or peppermint.
Fruit Cup.
Juice lemon, 1 teaspoonful lime juice, BEVERAGES 1 teaspoonful pineapple juice, 4 ounces sugar, 2 ounces shaved ice.
Fill up the glass with rich milk, shake until foamy, and drink at once.
Pineapple Lemonade. 1 pineapple, Juice 4 lemons, 1 pound sugar, 1 pint water.
Pare, eye, and grate the pineapple; add the strained juice of the lemons and a sirup made by boiling together for four minutes the sugar and water. When cold, add 1 quart water; strain and ice.
Fruit Beverage. 12 lemons, 2½ pounds sugar, 1 quart ripe raspberries, 1 pineapple.
Four soda-fountain drinks run together as they appear in the book, the last one truncated to a bare ingredient list. The measurements shift between weight, volume and "lumps" within a few lines, so read each one through before starting.
- The sugar in the Fruit Cup is almost certainly a misprintThe sugar in the Fruit Cup may well be a misprint -- four ounces of sugar by weight is over half a cup in a single glass, against about a quarter cup of shaved ice. The proportions read oddly whatever the intended unit was; treat the figure as ambiguous and sweeten to taste rather than following the number.
- Acid and milkLemon, lime and pineapple juice shaken into "rich milk" will curdle unless you drink it immediately; the original's "drink at once" may be for exactly that reason. Use cold whole milk or half-and-half, shake hard, and pour at once; there is no holding this one.
- Essence of cloves or peppermintThese were sold as alcoholic flavouring essences, the same class of thing as vanilla extract. Use a culinary peppermint or clove extract by the drop -- three or four is plenty -- and not undiluted clove oil, which is far stronger and unpleasantly numbing.
- Lumps of sugarPeriod lump sugar was cut by hand and varied, but a lump of roughly modern cube size is about a teaspoon, so three or four is somewhere near a tablespoon. In a glass filled with shaved ice they will not dissolve readily; muddle them with the orange juice first, or use simple syrup.
- Shaved iceShaved, not cubed. A blender pulse or a canvas bag and a mallet both work; the fine texture is what the recipes call for.
- "Pare, eye, and grate"Eyeing means cutting out the tough brown eyes left in the flesh after the rind comes off. Grating a fresh pineapple on a box grater gives pulp and juice together -- a food processor pulse does the same job, and the mixture is strained later anyway.
- Pineapple lemonade yieldThe finished quantity is about three pints of concentrate plus a quart of water, so roughly two and a half quarts, or eight to ten glasses. Chill it before adding ice or the ice will water it down.
- The Fruit Beverage has no methodThe book cuts off after the ingredient list: twelve lemons, two and a half pounds sugar, a quart of raspberries and a pineapple, with no water quantity given. It looks like a syrup base of the same type as the lemonade above, and treating it that way -- syrup, strained juices and crushed fruit, chilled, strained and diluted -- is a reasonable reconstruction rather than the book's own direction.
"Ching Ching" belongs to the era when the drugstore soda fountain and the domestic pantry overlapped: iced fruit drinks were mixed at home from the same essences, syrups and shaved ice that a dispenser used behind a marble counter. Household manuals of the period carried whole chapters of them, partly because ice had become cheap and widely delivered in American cities and partly because the temperance movement had created a real appetite for elaborate non-alcoholic drinks. The pineapple in three of these four recipes fits the same moment -- fresh pineapple was reaching mainland markets by steamer and rail in growing quantity around the turn of the century, chiefly from the Caribbean and Florida, while Hawaii's crop went mostly into cans -- and a whole fresh pineapple grated into a punch had gone from a luxury to something a book like this could assume. The name itself is unexplained here, one of many jingling trade names attached to whatever the mixer happened to combine.