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Chocolate Nectar
Put into a glass two tablespoons of chocolate syrup, a little cream or milk and chopped ice, and fill up the glass with soda water, Apollinaris, or milk. Drop a little whipped cream on the top
A soda-fountain drink of the sort home cooks copied once bottled mineral water and siphon soda became cheap. It assumes you already have a jar of chocolate syrup put up, which is why it sits in the preserving chapter.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated German mineral water, still sold, that was the standard "table water" of the period. Any well-carbonated sparkling mineral water works; plain club soda gives a cleaner, less mineral finish.
- The chocolate syrupNot the modern corn-syrup bottle. A period fountain syrup is cocoa, sugar and water simmered to a pourable syrup, sometimes with a little salt and vanilla. Two tablespoons of a thinner homemade syrup is about right; commercial syrup is sweeter, so start with one.
- Chopped iceIce was shaved or chipped off a block, so it melted fast and diluted the drink as it went. Crushed ice from a bag is the equivalent; cubes will leave the last third of the glass too strong.
- Order mattersSyrup and cream first, then ice, then the soda poured down the side of the glass in a slow stream. Adding fizz to a full glass of ice foams the milk fat and it goes over the rim.
- Milk as the fillerThe recipe allows soda water, Apollinaris or milk. Filled with milk it is closer to a chocolate milk than a fizzy drink; if you use milk, whisk or shake it so it comes up frothy.
- Glass and yieldFountain glasses of the period were generally tall and of roughly tumbler size. As written this fills one glass and serves one.
- The whipped creamThe recipe calls only for 'a little whipped cream' dropped on top; softly whipped and lightly handled so it floats rather than being stirred in.
Chocolate drinks like this belong to the American soda fountain, which by the 1890s and 1900s had moved out of the drugstore and into the home through siphon bottles and imported mineral waters. "Nectar" is often said to have been a fountain name for a syrup-and-soda drink dressed up with cream, sitting alongside phosphates, egg creams and ice-cream sodas on painted menu boards. Apollinaris, bottled at a spring in the German Ahr valley and marketed in Britain and America as the "Queen of Table Waters," was familiar enough by this date that a cookbook could name it without explanation.