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The Franklin
Into a glass half filled with cracked ice put four tablespoonfuls of banana syrup, and fill up the glass with ice-cold milk. Decorate with slices of banana and serve with a spoon or straws.
A soda-fountain drink of the sort a druggist would build to order in the years around 1919. Nothing here is difficult; the only real variable is the syrup.
- Banana syrupNot a supermarket item in the modern sense. Period banana syrup was often made by cooking fruit pulp with sugar and a little water and straining it, though many fountains worked from a flavouring essence instead; today's bottled banana syrups are usually flavoured sugar solutions and much sweeter. Taste before you commit to four tablespoons.
- How much is four tablespoonfulsA quarter cup, about 60 ml. In a glass of the size this drink implies, half filled with ice, that works out at roughly one part syrup to three parts milk.
- Cracked iceIce broken small, not cubed and not crushed to snow. Wrap cubes in a towel and hit them with a rolling pin, or pulse briefly in a blender. Crushed ice melts too fast and thins the drink before it is drunk.
- Ice-cold milkThe recipe gives no mixing instruction and no cooling step beyond the ice, so the milk must come straight from the coldest part of the refrigerator. Whole milk is presumably what the original assumes; skimmed milk leaves the banana tasting thin.
- Stir itThe recipe does not say so, but syrup that heavy will sit at the bottom of the glass. Stir with a long spoon until the milk is evenly coloured, then add the banana slices on top.
- Banana slicesCut them at the last moment and drop them in immediately; exposed banana browns within minutes.
- YieldOne glass, roughly 10 to 12 oz. Serve at once.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small burst of publishing that came with national Prohibition: books of "delicious drinks which can be made at home" aimed at households and hostesses suddenly obliged to entertain without liquor. Its recipes lean heavily on the American soda fountain, which by 1919 had been perfecting syrup-and-milk drinks for decades and was about to inherit much of the saloon trade. Naming a drink The Franklin fits the book's habit of giving plain milk-and-syrup combinations the dignity of a proper title. Bananas themselves were a recent everyday luxury, cheap and reliably available in American cities only once the fast steamer trade in fruit developed around the turn of the century, which is why banana syrup turns up so confidently here alongside older flavours like sarsaparilla and lemon.