The Lucerne
Put a ladleful of vanilla ice cream into a sherbet glass. Pour over a rich coffee syrup, and decorate with whipped cream.
A three-part fountain sundae that lives or dies on the syrup. Everything here is assembly, so make the coffee syrup properly and the rest follows.
- Coffee syrup"Rich" means a true syrup, not sweetened coffee: dissolve roughly 2 parts sugar in 1 part very strong cold-brew or double-strength brewed coffee, warm just enough to clear, then chill until it pours thickly. It should coat the ice cream rather than run off it. Bottled coffee syrup, still sold in New England, does the same job.
- A ladlefulFountain portions were served with a dipper or disher rather than measured by eye; read it as one generous scoop.
- Sherbet glassA small footed glass, typically only a few ounces. Any small stemmed glass works; the point is that the syrup pools visibly around the base of the ice cream.
- TemperatureBoth syrup and glass should be cold. Warm syrup on hard ice cream melts a slick at the contact point and the sundae collapses before it reaches the table.
- Whipped creamCream whipped to soft peaks with a spoonful of sugar, no vanilla; the ice cream already supplies it. A spoonful dropped on top will do.
- YieldOne glass, as written. Scale by the glass rather than mixing anything in bulk.
Soda fountain books like this one catalogued dozens of named sundaes, and among the names were borrowed glamour — European cities, spas and resorts lent respectability to a dish of ice cream and syrup, Lucerne among them. The genre boomed as American temperance sentiment hardened toward national prohibition: druggists and confectioners built elaborate cold-drink trades on the premise that a fountain could do socially what a bar had done, which is what a title about riding on Uncle Sam's water wagon is announcing. Coffee syrup itself was a fountain staple; it survives commercially in Rhode Island, where coffee milk made with it is the state drink, and it is often said to have been popularized there by Italian immigrant grocers repurposing leftover brewed coffee.