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Chocolate Milk Shake
Put two tablespoonfuls of cracked ice in an egg shaker, with two tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup, one half cup of milk, three tablespoonfuls of whipped cream, and one half cup of Apollinaris or any charged water. Shake well and serve in tall glasses with a spoonful of vanilla ice cream in each glass.
A soda-fountain drink scaled to the home kitchen, from the era when "milk shake" still meant something shaken by hand rather than spun in a blender. The quantities make one tall glass.
- Egg shakerA two-piece metal shaker of the kind soda clerks used for egg drinks and malteds. A cocktail shaker or a lidded jar does the same job; a blender does not, since it will whip the carbonation flat.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water widely sold in America before the First World War and still available. "Any charged water" means plain seltzer or club soda; skip flavoured sparkling waters, which fight the chocolate.
- Add the soda lastShaking half a cup of charged water with ice will strip most of the fizz. Shake the ice, syrup, milk and cream together, then pour into the glass and top with the soda if you want any lift left in it.
- Cracked iceIce broken to roughly pea size, not cubes and not crushed to snow. It chills fast in a hand shaker without watering the drink down the way finely crushed ice will.
- Chocolate syrupPeriod fountain syrup was cocoa or chocolate, sugar and water cooked to a pourable thickness; sweetness varied a good deal by formula, so a commercial syrup may read differently from what was intended here.
- Whipped creamThree tablespoonfuls of already-whipped cream, not liquid cream. It gives the shake body and the foamy head that hand-shaken fountain drinks were prized for.
- YieldThe recipe directs that it be served in tall glasses, with a spoonful of ice cream in each, so it is written for more than one glass; the liquid comes to roughly 12 ounces before the ice cream is added.
The recipe belongs squarely to the soda fountain, an institution that grew up alongside the temperance movement in the nineteenth century and that supplied the shaker, the syrup pump and the charged water this drink assumes. Apollinaris, bottled from a spring in the Ahr valley in Germany, was among the best-known imported table waters of the period, and its name is said to have been used loosely to mean sparkling water in general. The instruction to shake by hand is telling too: the home cook was expected to work a shaker herself.