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Pineapple Shake (Nearly fill a glass with sweet)
Nearly fill a glass with sweet cream. Add cracked ice and three tablespoonfuls of grated pineapple. Shake well and serve with a spoon.
A soda-fountain shake from the era before blenders, built on cream rather than ice cream. Two things decide whether it works: the fat content of the cream and how long you shake it.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured, not sugared — the opposite of the sour cream and buttermilk that were still common in home kitchens. Heavy cream at 36% or more will hold its body best; light cream or half-and-half is thinner and more likely to separate.
- Don't overshakeCream shaken hard with ice thickens fast and then breaks into butter and whey. Ten to fifteen seconds of vigorous shaking is enough to chill and aerate it; stop while it still pours.
- Grated pineappleFresh pineapple grated on the coarse side of a box grater, juice and all. Well-drained canned crushed pineapple is the closest substitute, though it is sweeter and softer; if you use it, expect a less bright result.
- A word on fresh pineappleRaw pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme, which can give dairy a sharp or slightly bitter edge if the mixture is left standing. Better to shake and serve immediately rather than mixing ahead.
- Cracked iceNot cubes and not crushed — ice broken into pea-to-marble-sized pieces, which chills quickly without watering the drink down. A few cubes in a towel, struck with a rolling pin, gives the right thing.
- Glass sizeFountain glasses of this period commonly ran somewhere around 8 to 10 ounces, so "nearly fill" points to roughly a cup of cream for one serving. That is very rich by current habits; half cream and half whole milk makes a drinkable version, and the recipe divides easily between two smaller glasses.
- SweeteningNo sugar is called for, and a ripe pineapple may not need any. If it does, a spoonful of simple syrup dissolves properly in a cold shake where granulated sugar will not.
- Why a spoonThe instruction may be a clue to the texture — cream shaken with ice comes out thick, closer to a loose whip than a milkshake — or simply a practical response to the pineapple shreds. A wide glass with a long spoon suits it better than a straw.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the last stretch of the American temperance campaign, when "on the water wagon" was everyday slang for having given up drink, and publishers were briskly supplying households with things to serve instead. Books like this drew heavily on the soda fountain, which by the 1910s was a fully developed commercial trade with its own vocabulary — shakes, phosphates, egg drinks, frappés — and a druggist behind the marble counter working with cracked ice, a shaker tin and cans of crushed fruit. Pineapple was a fountain staple by then: Hawaiian canning is generally said to have scaled up around the turn of the century, and grated or crushed pineapple in syrup was one of the cheapest reliable fruit flavours available year-round, which is why it recurs in these recipes alongside orange. The absence of ice cream in the formula is worth noting: a cream shake of this kind predates the thick ice-cream milkshake most readers now picture, and shows the fountain shake in its earlier form, where the shaking itself supplied the body.