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Brighton Shake
Mix two tablespoonfuls of vanilla syrup, two tablespoonfuls of pineapple syrup, and pour into a glass half filled with cracked ice. Add cold milk and stir briskly. Serve with straws.
A soda-fountain shake of the pre-blender era: no ice cream, no shaker, just syrup, ice and milk stirred to a froth. It goes together in under a minute, and the only real variable is the syrup.
- Syrup means fountain syrupPeriod fountain syrups were heavy, often something like two parts sugar to one of water, flavoured and sometimes lightly acidulated; proportions varied from formula to formula. Modern coffee syrups (Monin, Torani) are close enough. Thin fruit sauces or pancake syrup will leave the drink watery and flat.
- Four tablespoons totalThat is a quarter cup of syrup, which is generous but correct for a glass of unsweetened milk. Scale back to three tablespoons if your syrup is very sweet.
- Cracked ice, not cubesCracked ice is roughly thumbnail-sized shards, made by hitting cubes in a towel with a rolling pin. It chills and dilutes fast, which is the point — cubes will not do the same work in a stirred drink.
- Glass size and yieldFountain glasses of the period ran to something like ten or twelve ounces. Half-filled with ice, plus the syrup, there is room for only a few ounces of milk. One drink.
- "Stir briskly" was a machine job"Stir briskly" means what it says -- Some fountains of the period had spindle mixers, but this recipe calls for a stir, and it needs to be vigorous and aerating. At home, cover a jar and shake hard for fifteen seconds, or run it in a blender for five, then pour over the ice. A lazy spoon stir gives you sweetened cold milk and nothing more.
- Serve at onceThere is no ice cream or egg to hold the foam, so the head collapses within a minute or two and the melting ice dulls the flavour. Make it to order.
Books of non-alcoholic drinks of this kind appeared in the years when temperance sentiment was pushing hard toward what became national Prohibition — hence a title like On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon, published at the end of the 1910s, "on the water wagon" being the period idiom for having sworn off drink. A "shake" at that date did not necessarily contain ice cream: the word described the action, and a milk shake was often just flavouring syrup, milk and ice agitated together, sometimes with a whole egg added for body. The thick ice-cream version most people now picture is generally said to have become standard only after electric spindle mixers and reliable commercial freezers were common behind the counter. Pineapple and vanilla syrups were fountain staples, cheap and shelf-stable, and combining two syrups to invent a house drink was the ordinary business of a dispenser trying to fill out a list of recipes.