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Chocolate and Coffee Shake
Mix three tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup, one tablespoonful of coffee syrup, and four tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Add soda water, using the syphon.
A soda-fountain formula, written for someone standing at a counter with syrup pumps and a charged seltzer bottle within reach. Everything hinges on assembling the base first and adding the gas last.
- Order of operationsStir the syrups and cream together thoroughly in the bottom of a tall glass before any soda goes in. Carbonated water poured onto unmixed cream gives you streaks and a flat drink.
- The syphonA syphon is a pressurized seltzer bottle. A soda siphon charged with CO2 or a fresh bottle of plain seltzer both work; pour down the side of the glass at first, then aim at the center to raise the foam.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured, i.e. fresh cream rather than soured or cultured cream. Use heavy or whipping cream, not half-and-half, or the drink tastes thin against the syrup.
- Chocolate syrupFountain chocolate syrup was typically cocoa, sugar and water cooked to a thick pour, and may be less sweet than some bottled syrups sold today. If yours is very sweet, cut the quantity to two tablespoons.
- Coffee syrupStill sold in New England, where it is the basis of coffee milk; elsewhere it is a specialty item. A tablespoon of strong cold-brew concentrate reduced with an equal measure of sugar stands in acceptably.
- CurdlingCarbonic acid plus an acidic syrup will occasionally flock the cream into fine specks. Have everything cold, add the soda briskly, and drink it at once rather than letting it stand.
- YieldOne glass; the recipe does not state a size, and the amount of soda is left to the maker. Scale the base but charge each glass separately.
Books of this kind appeared in quantity in the years when American soda fountains were at their commercial peak; the water-wagon in the title is the old figure of speech for having given up drink. Druggists' fountains had the equipment for carbonated water and kept rows of flavoring syrups, so the recipes read as assembly instructions rather than cookery, and a great many of them are simply two syrups and cream. Coffee syrup is a bottled sweetened coffee concentrate that survives commercially mainly in Rhode Island, where it is the basis of coffee milk.