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Chocolate Nectar
Fill a glass one third full of cracked ice, then put in two tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup, a little cream or milk, and fill up the glass with Apollinaris or milk. Serve with a little whipped cream on top.
A soda-fountain drink of the temperance era, assembled in the glass rather than shaken. The whole thing depends on the syrup, since there is nothing else in it to carry flavor.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated German mineral water, bottled from the Apollinarisbrunnen in the Ahr valley and sold across America as a fashionable table water. Any plain sparkling mineral water or seltzer stands in; club soda works but its added salts read slightly flat against chocolate.
- Chocolate syrupFountain chocolate syrup of the period was cocoa, sugar and water cooked to a thin syrup, often with a little salt and vanilla. Modern bottled chocolate sauce is thicker and sweeter, so two tablespoons will read heavier than intended; start with one and a half.
- Cracked ice, not cubesCracked ice packs the glass more densely and chills faster, which matters when there is no shaking or stirring step. Cubes leave larger gaps and chill more slowly.
- The choice of liquid is the whole recipeFilling with Apollinaris gives a sharp, fizzy chocolate soda; filling with milk gives something close to chocolate milk. They are two different drinks, and the recipe leaves the decision to whoever is holding the glass.
- Pour orderSyrup first, then a splash of cream, then the sparkling water down the side of the glass. Adding carbonated water to cream too fast makes it foam over the rim and lose its gas.
- Glass size and yieldFountain glasses of the period varied, commonly somewhere in the range of 8 to 12 ounces, which is one serving. Scaling up in a pitcher does not work — the carbonation goes before it reaches the table.
- Whipped creamWhipped only to soft peaks so it sits on the surface instead of sinking. The recipe specifies nothing about sweetening; leaving it unsweetened keeps the drink from reading cloying on top of the syrup.
Drinks like this one belong to the American soda fountain, which flourished as the visible, respectable alternative to the saloon. Druggists had been dispensing carbonated mineral waters as a health measure since the early nineteenth century, and imported bottled waters such as Apollinaris carried enough medical prestige that mixing them with chocolate syrup and cream seemed both a treat and a tonic. The word nectar was not always a fixed formula in the fountain trade; it tended to signal a sweet, creamy, topped drink, and appears attached to several different syrup bases in books of this kind. What the recipe records is a moment when the ingredients of a milkshake and the ingredients of a mineral-water cure were kept side by side behind the same marble counter.