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Cream Fizz
Add to one quart of plain syrup, one teaspoonful of strawberry syrup, two teaspoonfuls of vanilla extract, and one pint of fresh cream. Put four tablespoonfuls into a glass with a little cracked ice and fill up with soda water.
This is a soda-fountain formula: you mix a cream base in bulk, then build each drink to order. Read it as a two-part operation and the odd proportions make sense.
- Plain syrupSoda-fountain "plain syrup" was a heavy simple syrup, considerably denser than the household 1:1 sort (formulas of roughly two parts sugar to one of water are typical), boiled briefly and cooled. Ordinary 1:1 simple syrup will give a noticeably thinner, less sweet result.
- MeasuresOne quart is 4 cups, one pint is 2 cups, so the base comes to about 48 fl oz. The four tablespoonfuls per glass is 2 fl oz of base, so the batch makes roughly 24 drinks.
- That teaspoon of strawberry syrupOne teaspoonful in six cups of base is a trace, and the two teaspoons of vanilla will dominate it entirely. If you want a strawberry cream fizz rather than a vanilla one, expect to use several tablespoons of fruit syrup.
- CurdlingFruit syrups are acidic and soda water is carbonic acid. Add the soda water last, pour it down the side of the glass onto the ice, and serve at once, or the cream will flock into specks.
- Soda waterThe original assumes a fountain drawing charged water under pressure, which gives a much coarser, harder stream than a bottle. Use the most vigorously carbonated seltzer you can get, well chilled; unchilled soda holds far less gas.
- Keeping the baseA cream-and-syrup base is a perishable dairy mixture. Keep it refrigerated, stir before each drink because the cream will separate, and use it within a day or two rather than treating it as a shelf-stable syrup.
- Cracked iceCracked, not crushed. Crushed ice melts fast enough to water the drink down and kills the head.
The title On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon plants this squarely in the American temperance moment: "on the water wagon" was slang for having sworn off drink, and the book gathers non-alcoholic drinks for making at home. The cream fizz is a soda-fountain staple of that world, built on the same logic as a bar's mixed drink -- a prepared base measured out by the spoonful, then lengthened with charged water at the moment of serving. The recipe is written to yield two dozen glasses rather than one. The style survives in the ice-cream soda and the egg cream, both of which depend on the same trick of carbonation hitting cream and sugar in the glass.