Home › Lemon and Lime › California Cream
California Cream
Put a tablespoonful of shaved ice into a glass, and pour over it three tablespoonfuls of vanilla syrup, three tablespoonfuls of orange pulp, and two tablespoonfuls of cream. Mix well, and fill up with carbonated water and add a spoonful of ice cream. Serve with a spoon.
A soda-fountain drink from the temperance era, built in the glass and finished with carbonated water. The proportions are small because the glass is small — this is a 8–10 oz fountain tumbler, not a pint.
- Vanilla syrupFountain syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, on the order of two parts sugar to one of water, flavored with vanilla. Commercial bottled syrups are generally thinner and sweeter-tasting; if you use one, cut the quantity or the drink turns cloying against the cream.
- Orange pulpNot juice. Fountain "pulp" meant crushed orange sections with their juice, sometimes lightly sugared. Segment an orange, chop it, and use the flesh and liquid together — juice alone gives you a thin, sharp drink with nothing to chew.
- Shaved iceA tablespoon of shaved ice is a token amount, meant to chill without diluting. Cubes will not behave the same way; crush them, or chill the glass and syrups in advance instead.
- Order of assemblyThe hinge is mixing the syrup, pulp and cream thoroughly before the carbonated water goes in, as the recipe directs. Soda added to unmixed cream and fruit acid is liable to give curdled streaks.
- CreamThe two tablespoons would have been ordinary sweet cream, whose fat content varied; anything from light cream to modern heavy cream is in range. Half-and-half works and is lighter, but the acid from the orange makes thin cream more likely to separate.
- Carbonated waterDraught fountain water was probably livelier than much bottled seltzer. Pour it down the side of the glass against a spoon to keep the head from foaming over the fruit.
- YieldOne glass. The ice cream goes on at the end and is eaten with the spoon as the drink is sipped, which is why the recipe specifies serving with one.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a genre that flourished as American temperance sentiment built toward Prohibition: books of "soft" drinks meant to give the druggist's soda fountain a repertoire as varied as the saloon's. The soda fountain had been a fixture of American pharmacies since the mid-nineteenth century — carbonated water was originally sold as a health tonic — and by the 1900s the fountain clerk worked from a standardized vocabulary of syrups, crushed fruit, cream and ice cream that reads much like a bartender's. Names such as California Cream did the same work as cocktail names, attaching glamour and geography to a formula; the orange is presumably the California in it. The addition of a spoonful of ice cream to a cream-and-soda drink is the step that separates a plain "cream soda" from an ice cream soda.