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Pineapple and Rose
Mix well one tablespoonful each of pineapple and orange syrups and one and a half tablespoonfuls of rose syrup. Pour into a glass one half full of cracked ice, and fill up with sweet cream. Put a spoonful of whipped cream and a few rose petals on top.
A soda-fountain cream drink, built in the glass rather than shaken. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the four ingredients mean something slightly different now than they did behind a 1919 counter.
- "Sweet cream" means fresh creamThe word distinguishes it from sour or cultured cream, not from a sweetened product. Use plain light cream or half-and-half; heavy cream will make the glass cloying against this much syrup.
- Fountain syrups, not fruit juicePineapple and orange syrups were heavy sugar syrups flavoured with juice and, for orange, often oil of peel; they were far sweeter and thicker than juice. Substituting straight juice will give you a thin, sharp drink that curdles more readily against the cream.
- Rose syrupStill sold, usually as Middle Eastern or South Asian rose sharbat, or as gulab syrup. Strengths vary enormously; start with a tablespoon rather than the full tablespoon and a half and taste, since a modern concentrate can turn the glass soapy.
- Acid and creamCitrus syrup poured onto cream can flock if it sits. Mix the three syrups together first, as directed, then add the cream over ice and stir at once.
- Cracked iceNot cubes and not crushed. Coarse fragments, about the size of a thumbnail, chill fast without watering the drink down to nothing before it is finished.
- Rose petalsOnly from roses you know to be unsprayed — florist roses are routinely treated with pesticides not approved for food. Trim the bitter white heel at the base of each petal.
- YieldOne glass, and a small one: the recipe does not name a size, but a fountain tumbler half filled with ice, plus 2½ tablespoonfuls of syrup, leaves room for only a few ounces of cream.
Helen Watkeys Moore's On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon appeared in 1919, the year the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, and its title is a joke aimed squarely at the moment — the "water wagon" being the one you climbed onto when you swore off drink. The book's job was to prove that a household could entertain without alcohol, and it does so largely by importing the vocabulary of the commercial soda fountain, which by then had spent decades perfecting sweet, cold, non-alcoholic drinking in American drugstores. Rose syrup belongs to that older confectionery tradition rather than to the fruit-and-phosphate side of the counter; rose water and rose syrup had flavoured European and Middle Eastern sweets for centuries and survived in Anglo-American cooking mainly in cordials, candies and ices. Pairing it with pineapple and orange is the book in miniature: an old perfume dressed up in fountain clothes.