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Chocolate Milk Shake
4 tablespoons chopped ice 4 tablespoons chocolate syrup 6 tablespoons whipped cream 1 cup milk 1 cup soda water or Apollinaris water Mix and shake well before drinking. A tablespoon of vanilla ice-cream may be added.
A soda-fountain drink from the era when a milk shake meant something shaken, not blended. The proportions are sound; only the vessels and one or two ingredients need translating.
- YieldRoughly 2 cups of liquid before the ice and cream, so one tall glass or two small ones. It is meant to be drunk immediately, while the carbonation is still lively.
- Chopped iceCracked or shaved ice rather than the fine snow a blender produces; it can be made by wrapping ice in a towel and crushing it. Four tablespoons is a small amount, enough to chill without watering the drink down.
- Apollinaris waterA naturally carbonated German mineral water, once sold everywhere in the United States and still available, though rarely stocked. Any plain seltzer or unflavoured sparkling water does the same job; avoid anything with added citrus or sweetener.
- Chocolate syrupFountain syrup of the period was a cocoa-and-sugar syrup rather than a modern squeeze-bottle product, and may have behaved differently. If using a commercial syrup, start with 3 tablespoons and taste before adding the fourth.
- Whipped creamThe recipe does not say whether to sweeten it; whipping only to soft peaks will let it fold into the liquid. Six tablespoons is three-eighths of a cup and is what gives the drink its body -- this is where the richness comes from, not from ice cream.
- How to shake itCombine everything except the soda water in a lidded jar or cocktail shaker and shake hard for fifteen seconds, then add the soda water and stir once. Shaking carbonated water in a sealed container will build pressure and force the drink out past the lid.
- The optional ice-creamA single tablespoon, which is a garnish rather than the base. A modern milk shake built on two scoops of ice cream is a different drink; this one is a shaken beverage.
Before the blender, a milk shake was literally shaken -- in a lidded tin, by hand or on a mechanical fountain shaker -- and it was as much a carbonated drink as a dairy one, which is why soda water appears here alongside the milk. Apollinaris, bottled from a spring in the Ahr valley in Germany, was a fixture of American druggists' counters and hotel bars in the decades before the First World War, and naming it was a way of saying "good sparkling water" rather than specifying a flavour.