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Strawberry Crush
Wash and mash one pint of fresh strawberries and add one pint of vanilla syrup. To serve, put three tablespoonfuls into a glass with one tablespoonful of rich cream and one teaspoonful of powdered sugar. Fill up the glass with any charged water.
A soda-fountain formula: a fruit base made in bulk, then built to order by the glass. The base is what needs attention; the assembly is a matter of seconds.
- Vanilla syrupFountain vanilla syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavored with vanilla; the proportions varied from book to book, so any vanilla syrup will serve. Commercial coffee-shop vanilla syrup works.
- YieldA pint of berries and a pint of syrup gives about a quart of base, or roughly 20 servings at three tablespoons each. Halve it unless you are making drinks for a crowd; the base keeps only three or four days refrigerated.
- Mash, do not pureeA fork or potato masher leaves the fruit in shreds that suspend in the syrup. A blender makes a foam that separates and clogs a straw. Strain out the coarsest pieces if you want the drink to draw cleanly.
- "Charged water"Plain carbonated water from a siphon — seltzer or club soda today. Avoid anything already sweetened or flavored, since the syrup and the added sugar carry all the sweetness the glass needs.
- The powdered sugar"Powdered sugar" then usually meant a fine-ground granulated sugar rather than modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar; either will dissolve readily in the cold cream, which is the point, where coarse granulated sugar sits grittily at the bottom. Stir the sugar into the cream and syrup before charging the glass.
- Rich creamFountain "rich cream" meant something appreciably richer than milk, roughly what we would call light or coffee cream. Light cream or half-and-half is the closest common equivalent; heavy cream makes a heavier, more milkshake-like drink.
- Order of assemblySyrup, cream and sugar in the glass first, stirred, then the soda poured down the side of the tilted glass. Adding soda to an unmixed glass throws the cream into a curdled-looking foam.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a body of American drink books published in the years when the temperance movement was gaining legislative ground — the title puns on the "water wagon" a reformed drinker climbed aboard. Drugstore fountains had begun as dispensers of medicinal mineral water and by the 1910s were serving as the respectable alternative to the saloon. A "crush" in fountain vocabulary meant a drink built on crushed fresh fruit rather than a bottled extract; the cream and powdered sugar here push it toward what a fountain would have called an ice-cream soda without the ice cream.