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Beverages: Cream
Cream Soda 1 pound loaf sugar, 2 cupfuls rich cream, 1 quart water, 66 1 tablespoonful McIlhenny's Mexican vanilla, ¼ ounce tartaric acid.
Mix the ingredients and bring slowly to a boil; then put in jars.
Use a tablespoonful of this and a third of a teaspoonful of soda to a glass of iced water.
Portable Lemonade.
Rasp the rind of a large and not too-ripe lemon on 1/4 pound loaf sugar, reduce it to powder, and mix with the strained juice of the fruit.
Stir well together, and when thoroughly mixed, press tightly into a small jar, cork, and tie over with waxed paper. When required for use, dissolve a tablespoonful of the paste in a glass of water with a lump of ice. This paste will keep good for months. If too sweet, a slight amount of citric acid will give it the necessary sharpness.
Egg Lemonade. 2 cupfuls sugar, 3 cupfuls water, Grated rind 1 lemon, Juice 3 lemons, 1 egg, 1 bottle effervescent water.
Boil together the sugar and water for ten minutes; add the grated rind and juice of the lemons. Allow this to cool, and at time of serving add the egg, beaten until very light and creamy, and the effervescent water, poured from some height in order that the mixture may foam. Serve with cracked ice in glasses.
Chocolate Cream Nectar. 4 tablespoonfuls hot coffee, 2 squares Runkel's chocolate, 1½ cupfuls sugar, 3 cupfuls water, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican vanilla.
Whipped cream.
A page of home soda-fountain syrups from the era when a household kept its own bottled flavourings and made the fizz at the table with acid and bicarbonate. Two of the four cannot be made safely as printed, and a third is missing its method entirely.
- The cream soda syrup is the main problemTwo cupfuls of cream are brought only to a boil and then put into jars, with no processing, no sealing method, no headspace and no instruction to refrigerate — the syrup is then drawn on a tablespoon at a time over days or weeks. A brief boil is not a preservation step for a dairy product, and the sugar and tartaric acid present are nowhere near enough to make it shelf-stable. Use a current recipe if you want a cream soda syrup.
- Raw egg in the egg lemonadeThe sugar syrup is boiled and then cooled, and the beaten egg goes in at the moment of serving, so nothing in the finished drink ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The lemon juice does not pasteurise it. Modern versions of the same drink use pasteurised shell eggs or carton whites.
- The acid-and-soda trickThe cream soda relies on tartaric acid in the syrup reacting with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda stirred into the glass to produce carbon dioxide on the spot. It is the same chemistry as a fizzy sherbet, and it is why that recipe calls for soda separately rather than for soda water. The citric acid in the portable lemonade is called for to sharpen the flavour, not to fizz, and the egg lemonade uses bought effervescent water.
- "4 ounce tartaric acid" is a misprintFour ounces of tartaric acid in one quart of syrup would be violently sour and well outside any sensible range. The original may well have read ¼ ounce, with the fraction lost in printing. Treat the quantity as unknown rather than guessing at it.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined sugar cast in a cone and broken or rasped as needed. It is plain white sugar; a pound is about 2¼ cups granulated. Rasping a lemon rind directly on the lump, as in the portable lemonade, was a common way of capturing the peel oil before zesters.
- The chocolate cream nectar has no methodOnly a list is given — coffee, chocolate, sugar, water, vanilla, whipped cream. The intended procedure was almost certainly to melt the chocolate in the hot coffee, boil it with the sugar and water into a syrup, cool, flavour with vanilla, and serve a measure of it over ice with soda and whipped cream. That is inference, not instruction.
- The one recipe that still worksPortable lemonade is sound: sugar, rind oil and strained juice pressed into a jar. It is essentially a lemon sugar paste, and the very high sugar concentration is what preserves it. Keeping it in the refrigerator rather than a corked jar in the larder is the only change worth making.
- Brand namesMcIlhenny's Mexican vanilla and Runkel's chocolate were advertised products of the period. Any good vanilla extract stands in for the first; the second was an unsweetened baking chocolate sold in squares of roughly one ounce.
These belong to the brief window when the soda fountain moved into the house. From the 1880s through the 1910s the American drugstore fountain was a genuine social institution, and household manuals of the kind this page comes from offered versions of the same drinks at home -- hence syrups measured by the quart, stored in jars, and drawn a tablespoon at a time. In the cream soda the fizz comes from a chemical reaction in the glass rather than from a charged siphon; effervescent water, called for in the egg lemonade, was the bought alternative. Egg drinks were commonly regarded as strengthening rather than indulgent, which may be why a raw egg turns up in a lemonade.