Home › Strawberry and Raspberry › Strawberry Float
Strawberry Float
Put two pounds of sugar into a porcelain-lined kettle and add one pint of cream, one pint of water, and eight tablespoonfuls of strawberry juice. Bring to a boil, and when cool add a few drops of vanilla extract. Put four tablespoonfuls of the syrup into a glass, fill up with soda water, using the syphon, and put a spoonful of whipped cream in each glass with a strawberry on top.
A soda-fountain cream syrup, made in bulk and drawn by the glass. The one thing to understand is that this is a dairy syrup, not a shelf-stable fruit syrup, and it behaves accordingly.
- Keep the heat gentleTwo pounds of sugar to a pint of cream is a very heavy syrup, and it will scorch on the bottom long before the surface shows it. Stir until the sugar has fully dissolved before the mixture comes up to a boil, and take it off as soon as it boils rather than letting it reduce.
- Porcelain-lined kettleMeans an enamelled cast-iron or steel pan, specified because bare iron or copper discolours fruit acids and dulls the colour. Any heavy nonreactive saucepan does the same job; avoid unlined aluminium with the strawberry juice.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half of syrup. At four tablespoons a glass that is roughly twenty-four drinks, so it is a batch formula rather than a single serving.
- StorageBecause of the cream, this is perishable in a way a plain fruit syrup is not. Refrigerate it and use it within three or four days.
- Strawberry juiceCrush ripe hulled berries and strain through a sieve or cloth. Eight tablespoons is half a cup, and it takes roughly a pound of berries to yield it. Bottled strawberry syrup is sweetened already and will throw the balance off.
- The syphonA charged seltzer siphon, which delivers soda water under pressure and drives it down through the syrup to mix it. A bottle of chilled sparkling water poured briskly does the same, though you will want to stir once at the bottom of the glass.
- Vanilla and coolingThe extract goes in after cooling for a reason: alcohol-based vanilla loses much of its aroma in a hot syrup. A few drops means a few drops -- an eighth of a teaspoon or less for the whole batch.
- ServingChill both the syrup and the soda water. A warm syrup meeting cold soda foams over the rim before the whipped cream ever gets on top.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of books published in the years around national Prohibition: collections of non-alcoholic drinks aimed at people who suddenly needed something to serve. The soda fountain had been growing steadily in American drugstores since the nineteenth century, and this syrup is built to be made once and dispensed many times. A "float" in this period did not always mean ice cream bobbing in soda; it could equally mean the spoonful of whipped cream floated on the surface, as it is used here. The heavy sugar load may do some work beyond sweetness, since sugar at high concentration slows spoilage.