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The Seattle
Mix four tablespoonfuls of raspberry syrup and four tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Pour into a glass one fourth full of chopped ice and add a ladleful of peach ice cream. Fill up the glass with soda water. Decorate with pieces of peach.
A soda-fountain drink written for someone standing behind a marble counter with a syrup pump, a carbonator and a tub of ice cream at hand. The proportions work at home with two adjustments: the syrup and the carbonation.
- Add the soda last, and slowlyThe recipe has you mix the syrup and cream before they go into the glass; pour the soda in last, down the side against a spoon. Dumped in fast, the carbonation and the acid syrup can curdle the cream into flecks.
- Fountain syrup, not cordialRaspberry syrup here means a heavy fountain syrup, thick with sugar and thick enough to coat a spoon; formulas varied from book to book. A modern thin raspberry cordial or a coffee-shop flavouring syrup is far weaker; use a good fruit syrup or cook your own from berries and sugar, or the drink reads as sweetened cream.
- "A ladleful"The measure is genuinely ambiguous. Fountain ladles and dishers came in numbered sizes, and no size is given, so read it as one modest scoop of ice cream, about 1/4 cup, which is what the rest of the proportions will carry.
- Soda waterPlain carbonated water, charged under pressure at the fountain and drawn cold. Use unflavoured seltzer or club soda straight from the refrigerator, opened at the moment of serving.
- Chopped iceCracked or crushed ice, not cubes. It chills fast and holds the ice cream up in the glass; cubes leave a gap the soda fills with foam.
- Glass size and yieldOne drink. The recipe gives no glass size, but a standard soda glass of about 10 to 12 oz suits it. Four tablespoons of syrup plus four of cream come to roughly 4 fl oz, and the recipe has the glass a quarter full of chopped ice before the ice cream goes in.
- The peach garnishFresh ripe peach, peeled and sliced, or drained canned slices out of season. Cut them before you start; the drink separates if it stands while you fuss with fruit.
This belongs to the last great era of the American soda fountain, when druggists' counters sold elaborate ice-cream sodas by the hundred. Books of this kind set out to prove that a temperance beverage could be as ornate and as branded as anything poured in a bar. Naming drinks after cities was a standard flourish of the genre, and the names generally tell you nothing about the place: The Seattle is a peach-and-raspberry cream soda, and there is no evidence it had any particular connection to Puget Sound beyond a dispenser wanting a name with some snap to it. What the recipe does document is the fountain pantry of the period, in which bottled fruit syrups, sweet cream, chipped ice and charged water were all kept within arm's reach of one another.