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Frosted Root Beer
Turn into a tall glass 4 tablespoons thick cream. Then pour in slowly so that it will not foam up and run over the glass, a chilled bottle of root beer. Top with 2 spoonfuls of sweetened whipped cream, flavor with lemon and serve immediately. Cracked ice may be added if desired. Individual service.
A soda-fountain float built in reverse: cream first, then the soda poured down onto it. The whole trick is the pour.
- Pour against the glassTilt the glass and let the root beer run down the inside wall onto the cream. Poured straight in, the carbonation hits the fat and protein and throws up a head that will overflow a tall glass in seconds.
- "Thick cream"This means heavy or whipping cream, roughly 36% butterfat, not the light coffee cream of the same era. Four tablespoons is a quarter cup.
- Bottle sizeThe recipe says only 'a chilled bottle' and gives no volume; single-serve bottles of the period varied. Leave room in the glass for the cream and the whipped topping.
- The lemon flavoringThe instruction most likely applies to the whipped cream topping, though the original wording is ambiguous. A few drops of extract, or a little finely grated zest, is enough; more will overwhelm the root beer.
- Chill everythingThe recipe specifies a chilled bottle; cold cream and a cold glass help too, since warmer soda foams more aggressively.
- Ice is optional for a reasonCracked ice dilutes the cream and knocks more gas out of the soda. If you use it, add it before the cream and keep the quantity small.
- Serve at onceGiven a couple of minutes the cream rises and the foam collapses into a flat brown ring. This is made to order, one glass at a time, as the original says.
- YieldOne tall drink.
Frosted floats belong to the American soda fountain, which by the 1930s was as much a fixture of the drugstore as the prescription counter, and cookbooks of the period sometimes printed fountain drinks for reproduction at home. Root beer itself descends from the sweetened, lightly fermented "small beers" brewed from roots and barks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with sassafras root a dominant flavor; commercial bottling from the later nineteenth century onward made it a year-round soft drink rather than a seasonal home brew. Safrole, the principal constituent of sassafras oil, was prohibited in food use in the United States in 1960, so modern root beer is flavored with safrole-free extracts and other aromatics. Fountain terminology varied from place to place: a "frosted" is often described as a drink enriched with cream or milk as against a full ice-cream float, but the usage was not consistent.