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The Chelsea
Mix four tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup and six tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Put into a glass one half full of cracked ice and fill up with soda water. Add a spoonful of ice cream and garnish with sliced pears or cherries.
A soda-fountain formula scaled for one glass, written when every drugstore had a marble counter and a pressurised siphon. Assembled in the right order it takes under a minute.
- Order of assembly mattersStir the syrup and cream together first, as the recipe directs, and only then add them to the glass of cracked ice and top with soda. Once the water is in, the cream is harder to blend and the drink goes streaky.
- Chocolate syrupThis means fountain syrup: cocoa, sugar and water cooked to a pourable thickness. A modern squeeze-bottle sundae sauce is not the same thing, so taste as you go and reduce the quantity if it is too sweet for you.
- "Sweet cream"Simply cream that has not soured — the distinction mattered when milk was delivered daily and turned quickly. Light cream or half-and-half is closest to what a fountain used; heavy cream makes the glass rich enough to be a dessert.
- Soda waterThe recipe assumes carbonated water delivered under pressure, whose force helped do the mixing. With bottled seltzer, pour down the side of the glass in two stages and stir gently between, or you lose most of the carbonation to foam.
- Cracked iceNot crushed: cracked ice is ice broken into rough pieces, coarser than crushed, so it chills fast without watering the drink down as quickly. The recipe calls for the glass one half full of it.
- The garnishSliced pears or cherries laid on the ice cream rather than stirred in. Canned pears and maraschino cherries would have been the likely fountain stock, though the recipe does not say.
This comes from a collection of nonalcoholic drinks published around the arrival of national Prohibition, which took effect in January 1920. Books like it borrowed wholesale from the professional soda fountain, which by then had spent half a century refining the combination of syrup, cream, ice cream and charged water into a trade with its own vocabulary and dispensing equipment. Fountain drinks were often named after hotels, clubs and city districts, the way cocktails were, and The Chelsea appears to follow that convention; which particular Chelsea is meant is not recorded here. What the recipe really documents is the moment the drugstore counter stopped being merely the temperance alternative to the saloon.