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The Pittsburg
Cut in small pieces several kinds of fruit, sprinkle with sugar, and let stand several hours or overnight. When serving put two tablespoonfuls into a tall glass with a ladleful of ice cream. Fill up the glass with soda water and serve with a spoon.
A soda-fountain drink rather than a cooked recipe: macerated fruit, ice cream, and carbonated water assembled in the glass. The original gives no quantities for the fruit or sugar, so the proportions are yours to set.
- The maceration is the whole pointSugar draws juice out of the cut fruit and makes a light syrup; that syrup, not the fruit pieces, is what flavours the soda. Figure roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar per cup of prepared fruit, and stir once or twice while it stands. Several hours is enough for berries and peaches; firmer fruit benefits from overnight.
- "Several kinds of fruit"Soft summer fruit suits this best: strawberries, raspberries, sliced peaches, pineapple, banana, cherries. Avoid fresh pineapple, kiwi or papaya if the mixture will sit long with dairy, since their enzymes turn cream unpleasantly thin and bitter.
- A ladleful of ice creamRead this as one modest scoop rather than two; a second scoop will crowd a tall glass once the soda foams.
- Soda waterPlain carbonated water, from a siphon or fountain. Bottled club soda or seltzer works; skip tonic and anything sweetened, since the fruit syrup already carries the sugar.
- Assembly orderFruit first, then ice cream, then soda poured slowly down the inside of the glass against the spoon. Poured straight onto the ice cream it will foam over the rim within seconds.
- Glassware and temperatureA 12 to 14 oz tall glass, chilled, and the soda water as cold as you can get it. Warm soda loses its gas immediately and the drink goes flat before it reaches the table.
- YieldA quart of macerated fruit at two tablespoons per glass gives you about thirty-two drinks, so a cup or two of fruit is plenty for a small gathering. The fruit keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
The book this comes from belongs to the wave of temperance drink manuals published in the United States in the years before national Prohibition, when hostesses were expected to set a table without wine and needed something better than lemonade to do it with. Drinks in these collections lean heavily on the commercial soda fountain, an established American institution with its own vocabulary of ladles, dishers and siphons, and "The Pittsburg" is a fountain-counter formula written down for home use. The spelling here reflects the fact that Pittsburgh officially went without its final h from 1891 until 1911, a federal decision the city fought and eventually reversed - printed matter kept the shorter form for years afterward. What the recipe records is less a dish than a habit: sugared fruit standing in a bowl on the sideboard, ready to be spooned into a glass whenever someone wanted a drink and nothing stronger was on offer.