The La Salle
Cover a ladleful of vanilla ice cream with crushed cherries, and add marshmallow cream. Decorate with a cherry.
A soda-fountain sundae, written for a counterman who had every component already in a jar at his elbow. Two of the three ingredients mean something slightly different now.
- A ladlefulRoughly one modest scoop, on the order of 2 fluid ounces. One recipe serves one person.
- Crushed cherriesNot fresh fruit. This is the fountain trade's crushed cherry topping: maraschino or sweet cherries broken up and held in heavy syrup. Chopped maraschinos with a spoonful of their own syrup gives the same effect; fresh cherries alone will taste thin against the marshmallow.
- Marshmallow creamFountain marshmallow was often a pourable syrup or whip, looser than the jarred marshmallow creme sold today. Warm or thin modern creme slightly with hot water or simple syrup so it drapes rather than sits in a lump.
- Order of assemblyCherries under the marshmallow, as written. Reversing them buries the fruit and the sundae reads as plain marshmallow.
- Working aheadMarshmallow cream stiffens fast on cold ice cream. Have both toppings at hand and serve immediately; there is nothing here that holds.
This comes from a book of fountain formulas published in the years when American druggists and confectioners were building a whole trade on ice cream and flavored syrups — a business that is often said to have grown as temperance sentiment, and then national Prohibition, closed the bars. Sundaes were named the way cocktails were, after hotels, cities, society figures and local landmarks, and the names were largely interchangeable house branding: the same three components under a dozen titles. La Salle is sometimes traced to the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, though a hotel or street bearing the name is at least as likely a source, and the recipe itself gives no indication; fountain men borrowed such names freely to make a simple sundae sound like a specialty. Marshmallow cream itself was a comparatively new convenience in this period, sold to the trade in tins, and it appears in fountain manuals for exactly the reason it appears here: it added bulk, gloss and a sense of luxury for almost no labor.