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The Ansonia
Mix four tablespoonfuls of maple syrup with six tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Add cracked ice and shake well. Fill up glass with soda water and put in a spoonful of ice cream.
A soda-fountain formula written for someone standing at a marble counter with a syrup pump and a siphon. Everything translates directly to a home kitchen, with a few vocabulary swaps.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured, not sweetened. Use plain heavy or whipping cream; the drink's body depends on the fat, so half-and-half gives a thinner result.
- Maple syrupFountain "maple" syrup of the period was often a maple-flavoured cane syrup rather than pure sap syrup. Real maple syrup works and gives more flavour, though it is thinner than a fountain syrup and will disperse faster.
- Measures and yieldFour tablespoons is 1/4 cup, six is 3/8 cup. The recipe gives no glass size, so the finished volume depends entirely on the glass used; the syrup and cream together come to about 5 fluid ounces before the soda and ice cream.
- Shake without the sodaThe shaking step is only for the syrup, cream and ice. Carbonated water added before shaking will foam over and go flat; it goes in after, poured down the side of the glass.
- Cracked iceCracked ice chills and dilutes at once, which is the point. Strain it out into the serving glass or leave it in, but do not substitute a few large cubes, which will not chill the cream mixture in the time available.
- The ice cream lastA single spoonful floated on top, not stirred in. The recipe does not name a flavour; vanilla is the safe choice. It is there to foam against the soda rather than to make a thick milkshake.
- Soda waterAny strongly carbonated unflavoured seltzer. Use it cold and fresh from a sealed bottle or siphon, since flat water leaves the drink sweet and heavy.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon collected soft-drink and fountain recipes at a moment when American temperance sentiment was building toward national Prohibition, and books like it gave hotels and drugstores a repertoire of drinks that could be served without a bar licence. The name probably points to a building or hotel -- the Ansonia was a well-known apartment hotel on New York's Upper West Side -- but the book does not say so, and fountain drinks took their names from places and people of several kinds. The construction itself is a standard fountain "cream soda" or ice-cream soda: a measured syrup, a measured dairy component, ice, carbonated water and a float, assembled in a fixed order so the carbonation survives the mixing.