The Parkside
Put into a sherbet glass enough crushed cherries to nearly fill glass. Add whipped cream or marshmallow cream, and sprinkle with cocoanut.
A fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the whole of it turns on the components you bring to the glass. Three ingredients, two of which meant something different in 1919 than they do now.
- Crushed cherriesAt a soda fountain this most likely meant preserved cherries in heavy syrup, crushed so the juice ran. Fresh sweet cherries, pitted and mashed with a spoonful of sugar and left twenty minutes, come closest; drained maraschinos are the closer commercial match but far sweeter.
- Where is the ice creamThe recipe names no ice cream, and the cherries are said to nearly fill the glass. Read literally it is a fruit-and-cream dish. If the book groups it with sundaes, a scoop of vanilla underneath would be in keeping, but the text does not call for it.
- Sherbet glassA footed fountain sherbet of the period was a small glass, on the order of 5 to 6 oz, smaller than many modern coupes. Scale down if your glass is larger or the cherries will overwhelm the cream.
- Marshmallow creamFountain marshmallow was a hot sugar syrup beaten into egg white. Jarred marshmallow creme from a supermarket is the nearest modern equivalent and needs only loosening with a teaspoon of hot water so it will pour.
- CocoanutDesiccated shredded coconut, which was sold both sweetened and unsweetened. Given how sweet the cherries and marshmallow already are, use unsweetened, and toast it in a dry pan for two or three minutes for contrast.
- Assembly orderBuild it and serve it. Whipped cream on wet fruit begins to weep within a few minutes, and coconut sprinkled early goes soft and loses the point of it.
- YieldOne glass, as written. Multiply by the number at table rather than scaling a batch.
This comes from a 1919 collection of non-alcoholic drinks and fountain dishes published as national prohibition approached, and the title's joke about riding on Uncle Sam's water wagon suggests a book anticipating that moment rather than recording it, since the saloons closed with the Volstead Act's effect in January 1920. The soda fountain had been growing for decades on its own merits, but the closing of the saloons handed it a captive trade, and druggists and hotel counters answered with long lists of named sundaes. The Parkside belongs to that habit of naming a combination after a hotel, a street or a park so it could be ordered by name and charged for accordingly; such names travelled between fountain manuals freely and rarely carry any documented origin. Marshmallow cream and shredded coconut, both industrially produced by the 1910s, are the tell that this is a commercial fountain recipe rather than a domestic one.