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The Hawthorne
Put a ladleful of vanilla ice cream into a dish and cover with sliced peaches. Add whipped cream and chopped pecan nuts. Serve with a sweet cracker.
A fountain-counter assembly rather than a cooked dish, so nearly everything depends on temperature and timing. Everything should be ready before the ice cream leaves the freezer.
- A ladlefulSoda fountains portioned ice cream with a ladle or disher; sizes varied, but the sense here is a single generous scoop. Two scoops per serving is closer to modern expectation but will outweigh the fruit.
- The peachesPeeled, sliced ripe peaches; freestone are the easiest to work with. Out of season, drained canned peaches are a reasonable substitute for underripe fresh fruit; toss fresh slices with a spoonful of sugar and let them stand ten minutes to draw a little juice.
- Whipped creamWhip heavy cream to soft peaks, plain or barely sweetened, and use it within a few minutes, or it will weep over the ice cream.
- PecansChop them coarsely and toast them dry in a skillet or a 350F oven for six to eight minutes, then cool completely. Untoasted pecans taste flat against sweet cream, and warm nuts will melt the scoop.
- The sweet crackerThis most likely means a thin plain sweet wafer served alongside rather than a savoury cracker. A vanilla wafer, langue de chat or thin sugar cookie fills the role.
- Glassware and serviceUse a chilled footed tulip sundae glass or a shallow bowl straight from the freezer, and build in order: ice cream, fruit and its juice, cream, nuts. Serve at once with a long spoon.
- YieldOne sundae. The proportions scale directly, but assemble each dish individually rather than building several in advance.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of temperance and soda-fountain books published as national Prohibition arrived, when the drugstore counter took over much of the social business of the saloon and needed a repertoire to match. Named sundaes like this one were the fountain trade's equivalent of a cocktail list: a fixed formula the dispenser could build in seconds, distinguished from its neighbours on the card by a single garnish. The combination of peaches, pecans and cream suggests an American Southern character, and may reflect the pecan's rise as a commercial crop in the decades around 1900. The word sundae itself is generally traced to late nineteenth-century attempts to sell ice cream with syrup on Sundays, though rival towns have claimed the invention for over a century and the documentary record settles none of them.