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The Riverside
Pour two tablespoonfuls of maple syrup and two tablespoonfuls of pineapple syrup into a glass half full of chopped ice. Add a spoonful of ice cream and fill up the glass with soda water. Grated pineapple may be added.
A soda-fountain formula from the era when the counter man worked from a rack of numbered syrups and a carbonating siphon. Nothing here is difficult; the variables are glass size, syrup strength and how hard the carbonation is.
- The hinge: add the soda last and slowlyIce cream and carbonated water foam violently on contact. Tip the glass, run the soda down the side in two stages, and let the head settle before topping up, or you lose half the drink over the counter.
- Pineapple syrupThis most likely means a fountain syrup rather than canned pineapple juice. Any sweet pineapple syrup will do; fountain syrups were generally heavier than a plain simple syrup, so err on the sweet, thick side. Juice alone is thinner and will taste watery against the maple.
- Maple syrupA dark, strongly flavoured syrup suits the drink better; something in the range of modern Grade A Dark or Very Dark. A pale golden syrup tends to disappear under the pineapple.
- Chopped iceCrushed or shaved ice, not cubes. It chills fast and gives the drink the slushy body it is meant to have. Cubes leave the syrups sitting unmixed at the bottom.
- "A spoonful of ice cream"Not a full scoop; a spoonful is what the text asks for. Plain vanilla is the safest choice, since anything richer or more strongly flavoured competes with the maple.
- Glass sizeUse a glass in the range of a tall soda glass rather than a pint; four tablespoons of syrup plus a spoonful of ice cream will taste thin if the glass is too large.
- Soda waterUse the coldest, most heavily carbonated seltzer available, straight from a fresh bottle or siphon. Flat soda leaves the drink cloying, since there is no acid in it beyond what the pineapple provides.
- Grated pineappleThe optional addition is fresh fruit grated on a coarse grater, stirred in at the end. Canned crushed pineapple works but drains poorly; press out the packing syrup first or the drink oversweetens.
- YieldOne glass. Scale by the glass rather than mixing a batch, since the soda goes flat in minutes.
The soda fountain produced large numbers of named house drinks of exactly this pattern -- two syrups, ice, a scoop of cream, carbonated water -- with names borrowed from hotels, resorts, rivers and the like rather than from any ingredient. "The Riverside" is one of those, a label rather than a description. The pairing of maple with pineapple is worth noticing: maple was a domestic sweetener of the Northeast, while Hawaiian canned pineapple, which reached the mainland in growing quantity from around the turn of the century, still carried a whiff of the exotic.