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Coney Island Shake
Mix one tablespoonful of vanilla syrup, one tablespoonful of strawberry syrup, and one teaspoonful of orgeat syrup. Stir well, fill up the glass with milk, and add a spoonful of whipped cream.
A soda-fountain milk shake of the sort dispensed by the glass, built from bottled syrups rather than fruit. The proportions are for a single tall glass and depend entirely on the syrups being sweet and concentrated.
- Orgeat is the hingeOrgeat is an almond syrup, traditionally scented with orange-flower water, and a single teaspoon is what separates this from a plain strawberry shake. Modern orgeat sold for cocktails works; almond extract is not a substitute, being far more aggressive and lacking the sugar.
- Fountain syrups, not preservesThe strawberry and vanilla syrups called for are thin sugar syrups, roughly the consistency of maple syrup, not jam or fruit sauce. If you use a modern coffee-bar syrup the sweetness will be about right; if you use crushed sweetened berries the drink will be thicker and less sweet.
- Glass sizeFountain glasses of the period varied, commonly somewhere around 8 to 12 ounces, so "fill up the glass" means roughly a cup to a cup and a quarter of milk over the two tablespoons plus a teaspoon of syrup, leaving room for the cream. Serves one.
- Shake means shakeDespite the title the instruction only says stir. For the texture the name implies, combine syrups and cold milk in a shaker or blender and work it until foamy, then pour and top with cream.
- The creamThe recipe says only "a spoonful of whipped cream," so it is spooned on rather than piped; whether it was sweetened is not specified. Aerosol cream collapses into the milk quickly.
- TemperatureThere is no ice cream and no ice in this formula, so the milk must be thoroughly cold going in or the drink is flat and tepid. Chill the glass as well if you can.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of American drink books published as national Prohibition approached, offering the soda fountain as a respectable replacement for the bar; the title plays on the temperance phrase "on the water wagon." Recipes like this one are essentially fountain-counter formulas transcribed for home use, which is why they assume a shelf of bottled syrups and say nothing about ice cream. Nothing in the text explains the Coney Island name, and no particular stand or proprietor is documented behind it. Orgeat is the older element in the glass: an almond-and-sugar syrup used in European kitchens long before the soda fountain existed, and it appears in fountain formularies of the period, where a small amount was valued for rounding out fruit flavors.