The Brevoort
Put a ladleful of vanilla ice cream in a sundae dish. Add one half teaspoonful of malted milk and cover with grape juice. Add whipped cream and a few grapes.
A soda-fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the only real variables are the proportions and the quality of the three components.
- A ladlefulFountain ladles and dishers varied, but the intent is a single generous scoop of ice cream, on the order of a quarter to a third of a cup. The dish is meant to be small; this is a single serving.
- Malted milkMalted milk powder, then sold by Horlick's and its imitators, is still available and is what is meant here. Half a teaspoon is deliberately restrained, enough to give the malty, faintly savory note that keeps the grape juice from reading as pure candy.
- Sprinkle, do not stirScatter the powder directly on the ice cream and pour the juice over it. Malted milk clumps in cold liquid, so mixing it into the grape juice first will give you grit rather than flavor.
- Grape juiceMost likely the unfermented bottled Concord juice of the period, sweet and strongly perfumed. Modern Concord juice is the closest equivalent; white grape juice is far milder and will leave the sundae tasting of little but cream.
- How much juice"Cover" is vague. Two to three tablespoons is enough to coat the scoop without flooding the dish and thinning the cream into a pink slurry.
- Whipped creamWhip it barely sweetened, or not at all. The juice supplies plenty of sugar, and unsweetened cream is what makes the combination taste balanced rather than syrupy.
- The grapesConcord grapes are seeded and slip-skinned; halve and seed them, or use seedless table grapes, halved. Chilled grapes hold up better than room-temperature ones against the ice cream.
This comes from a book of non-alcoholic drinks published in the years when the temperance movement was pressing hard on American drinking habits, and its recipes borrow the names and the ceremony of the bar so that abstainers need not feel they were getting something lesser. The Brevoort is generally traced to the Brevoort House, the Fifth Avenue hotel long associated with New York's literary and expatriate set; naming soft drinks and sundaes after fashionable hotels and their bars is often said to have been common at the soda fountain, which is sometimes described as having taken over a good deal of the saloon's social function. Unfermented grape juice carried a particular charge in this context: it was promoted vigorously by temperance-minded producers as the wholesome counterpart to wine, and it turns up constantly in books of this kind. Malted milk, marketed from the 1880s onward as an invalid and infant food, had by this date crossed over into the fountain trade as a flavoring, which is why half a teaspoon of what began as a nursery tonic ends up under a scoop of vanilla ice cream.