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Peach Shake
Mix four tablespoonfuls of peach syrup with three fourths of a pint of orange syrup and one half pint of vanilla syrup. Add one pint of cream. Put two tablespoonfuls of the syrup in a tall glass and fill up with carbonated water, or cold milk may be used to make milk Shake.
This is a fountain formula in two stages: you build a cream-and-syrup base, then dose it by the glass. Treated as a single drink it makes no sense, so read the proportions as a batch.
- The measurementsA pint is 2 cups, so three fourths of a pint is 1 1/2 cups and a half pint is 1 cup. The finished base comes to roughly 4 3/4 cups.
- Yield, which the original hidesAt two tablespoonfuls per glass that base would stretch to nearly forty drinks, which is a soda counter's arithmetic rather than a home cook's. For a glass with any flavour at all, count on 2 to 3 fluid ounces of base per serving, which makes the batch roughly 13 to 19 drinks.
- What "syrup" meantFountain syrups were heavy sugar syrups, on the order of two parts sugar to one of water, flavoured with fruit juice or pulp and extract. Modern coffee-bar syrups are close enough in sweetness; fruit preserves thinned with hot water also work, but pancake-style fruit syrups are thinner and will leave the drink watery.
- Vanilla syrupNot vanilla extract. It is sugar syrup flavoured with vanilla, and substituting extract measure for measure will make the base bitter and unsweet.
- Keeping the baseOnce cream goes in, the mixture is a perishable dairy product. Keep it covered and cold and use it within a day or two; the sugar does nothing to preserve it at this dilution.
- Carbonated waterThe original assumes fountain-drawn or bottled carbonated water. Use seltzer or soda water poured hard down the side of the glass over the syrup, then stir once. Pour gently and the cream will flatten the fizz.
- Making it a shakeWith cold milk instead of soda, shake the milk and base together in a covered jar or blend briefly rather than stirring. The period version contains no ice cream, so it will be thin by current expectations.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon is generally credited to Helen Watkeys Moore and belongs to the flood of non-alcoholic drink books that appeared as national prohibition approached; the title puns on the temperance phrase for going dry. Many of its recipes read as bulk formulas with a per-glass dose at the end rather than as household instructions. The American drugstore fountain had its own repertoire of flavoured syrups, carbonated water and cream. A shake in this period meant exactly that, a drink shaken with milk or cream; the thick ice-cream version most people now picture came later.