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Pineapple Shake (Mix well one tablespoonful)
Mix well one tablespoonful each of rose, pineapple, vanilla, and orange syrups, with two tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Pour into a glass one fourth full of crushed ice, and serve with straws.
A soda-fountain formula, written for someone standing behind a marble counter with a rack of pump syrups within reach. Scaled for a single glass, it takes about a minute to assemble.
- The name is the instruction"shake" at the fountain generally implied the mixture was worked in a metal cup, by hand or on a spindle mixer, though the printed text here says only to mix and pour. Mixing the syrups and cream thoroughly before they meet the ice helps keep the cream from sitting on top of the slush.
- Fountain syrupsRose, pineapple, vanilla and orange syrups were bar staples, built on a heavy sugar syrup with flavouring extract or fruit juice. Modern coffee-bar syrups are a reasonable substitute; grenadine-style bottled fruit syrups are sweeter and thicker and will need a lighter hand.
- Rose syrupThe one ingredient a modern cook is unlikely to have. Look for Middle Eastern or South Asian rose syrup (often sold as sharbat gulab or rooh afza-type cordials); these tend to be strongly perfumed, so a teaspoon may do the work of the tablespoon called for.
- Sweet creamMeans fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream of the period. Use heavy or whipping cream; half-and-half gives a thinner drink.
- Crushed iceThe recipe specifies crushed ice, so use finely crushed rather than cubes; the glass is only one fourth full of it.
- SweetnessFour tablespoons of syrup in a single small glass is very sweet by current taste. Cutting to a teaspoon or two of each syrup, or lengthening the glass with soda water, brings it closer to what most people now expect from a milkshake.
- YieldOne glass. The measured syrups and cream come to about three fluid ounces before ice, so a small glass is intended, not a modern 16-ounce cup.
Books like this one belong to the years when American temperance work and the soda fountain were commercially intertwined: the drugstore counter offered a public place to drink something cold and sweet that was not beer, and collections of fountain formulas circulated among druggists, hotel men and household cooks alike. The syrups here are pure fountain vocabulary: rose, vanilla, orange and pineapple were among the standard pumps, and a great many "recipes" in such books amount to permutations of the row of bottles on the back bar. Rose flavouring, which now reads as exotic, was ordinary in nineteenth-century American confectionery and only fell out of the sweet-drink repertoire later, as fruit and chocolate flavours took over. The instruction to serve with straws is a period detail worth noticing: paper drinking straws had become cheap and commonplace by the 1910s.