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Hot Ginger Cream
Mix two tablespoonfuls of ginger syrup with four tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Add hot water and whipped cream.
A soda-fountain drink from the era when the fountain was learning to imitate the bar. The proportions given are for a single cup, and the one unstated quantity — the hot water — is what you adjust to taste.
- Ginger syrupNot ginger ale and not ginger beer, but a heavy sugar syrup infused with fresh or dried ginger, standard stock at the period's fountains and in well-stocked households. Bottled ginger syrup sold for coffee drinks works; so does simmering 1 cup sugar, 1 cup water and about 3 oz sliced fresh ginger for ten minutes and straining.
- "Sweet cream"Period shorthand for fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour or ripened cream sold alongside it. Any modern heavy or whipping cream is what is meant.
- How much hot waterThe original leaves it open. Four tablespoons of cream plus two of syrup comes to about 3 fl oz, roughly half a teacup; another 5 oz or so of hot water brings it up to a full cup without thinning the body.
- Do not boil itAdd water hot but off the boil, around 175F. Cream stirred into boiling water can curdle, and the drink is meant to be smooth rather than scalding.
- Warm the cupA cold cup drops a hot drink of this size several degrees immediately, and the whipped cream on top insulates the surface rather than the base. Rinse the cup with hot water first.
- The whipped creamUnsweetened, softly whipped, floated rather than stirred in — the syrup already carries the sugar. A grating of nutmeg or a pinch of ground ginger over the top is in keeping with the period.
- YieldOne cup, one serving. The formula scales directly: one part syrup to two parts cream, per drink.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the run of American drink books published as Prohibition moved from a state-by-state campaign toward national law, and its purpose was to prove that a household or a soda fountain could serve something interesting without spirits. Hot drinks built on cream and a flavoured syrup were the fountain's answer to the hot toddy and the hot buttered rum: the same cup, the same winter occasion, the same warming spice, with sugar syrup standing in for liquor. Ginger did much of the work in these formulas because it carries genuine heat on the tongue, and it turns up often in temperance drink lists, where ginger syrup gave a drinker something with a bite to it.