Home › Fruit Drinks and Cider › Peach Cream
Peach Cream
Mix two tablespoonfuls of peach syrup with one tablespoonful each of grape juice and pineapple syrup. Pour into a glass one half full of cracked ice and add milk to fill glass. Stir well and serve with straws.
A soda-fountain milk drink, built in the glass rather than shaken. The whole thing depends on the syrups, which in 1919 meant sweetened fountain syrups, not the thin juice a modern reader might reach for.
- What "syrup" means herePeach and pineapple syrup are fountain syrups: fruit cooked with a heavy proportion of sugar, strained, and kept bottled behind the counter, with proportions varying from house to house. Bottled snow-cone or coffee syrups are the closest current equivalent; unsweetened juice will give you a thin, sour drink.
- Grape juiceUnfermented bottled grape juice, the Concord-based product associated with temperance households. Any 100 percent Concord grape juice works, and its colour will tint the drink a pale mauve.
- The hinge: acid and milkThree fruit syrups plus cold milk carries a curdling risk, chiefly from the acidic grape juice. Pour the milk in last, over the ice, stir just enough to combine, and serve at once; standing at room temperature, or using warm milk, makes separation more likely.
- Glass sizeA fountain glass of the period ran about 8 to 10 ounces. Half-filled with cracked ice, and allowing for the three tablespoons (about 1.5 ounces) of syrup, that leaves roughly 3 to 5 ounces of milk. Makes one drink.
- Cracked iceCracked, not cubed, and not crushed to slush. Pieces the size of a thumbnail chill fast without watering the milk down before it is drunk. Wrap cubes in a towel and hit them with a rolling pin.
- SweetnessThree tablespoons of full-strength fountain syrup in a small glass is sweeter than most modern palates want. Two tablespoons total, weighted toward the peach, gives a drink closer to a thin milkshake.
This appears to belong to the wave of non-alcoholic drink books associated with the temperance era, when soda fountains were widely expected to inherit the saloon's trade and "the water wagon" was current slang for having sworn off drink. The genre leaned hard on bottled fruit syrups and unfermented grape juice, the latter closely tied to the temperance movement itself, since pasteurised grape juice had been developed in the nineteenth century partly to supply churches and households that wanted the fruit without the fermentation. A drink like this one is essentially a soda-fountain formula written out for home use: syrups measured in tablespoons, ice cracked by hand, milk instead of carbonated water, and straws assumed. The result sits somewhere between a milkshake and a lassi, and it shows how much of early twentieth-century American soft-drink culture was built not on fresh fruit but on the sweetened, shelf-stable syrup bottle.