Home › Fruit Drinks and Cider › The Tokio
The Tokio
Mix thoroughly four tablespoonfuls of orgeat syrup with eight tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Add a spoonful of ice cream and fill up the glass with cold milk.
A soda-fountain milk drink built on almond syrup, dating from the era when the fountain was the temperance answer to the bar. It comes together in a minute, and the only real skill is dissolving the syrup into the cream before the milk goes in.
- Orgeat syrupA sweet almond syrup, still sold for cocktails (Torani, Small Hand Foods and similar). Period orgeat was sometimes made at home with bitter almonds for flavour; buy a commercial bottle rather than attempting that.
- Sweet creamSimply means fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream of a period dairy. Light cream or half-and-half suits the drink better than heavy cream, which makes it cloying at eight tablespoonfuls.
- The measuresFour tablespoons of syrup is a quarter cup; eight of cream is half a cup. That is a good deal of syrup, so taste after mixing and hold some back if you want the almond less forward.
- The hingeStir the syrup and cream together completely before any milk or ice cream joins them. Cold milk poured onto undissolved syrup tends to leave a sugary layer at the bottom of the glass that is hard to stir back in.
- A spoonful of ice creamThe flavour is unspecified; vanilla is the neutral choice. Keep it to a spoonful, as the text says, rather than a full scoop: it is there for body and a little froth, not as a float. Add it after the syrup and cream are combined and stir just enough to break it up.
- Glass sizeThe recipe does not say what glass it means. A standard fountain glass takes something under a pint, so 'fill up the glass' means roughly a cup of cold milk. Makes one drink.
- ServingServe immediately and unstrained. It separates as it stands, and the ice cream is only pleasant while the drink is still very cold.
Orgeat itself is much older than the American soda fountain: the name descends through French from Latin hordeum, barley, because the earliest syrups of the name were barley-water preparations, with almonds gradually displacing the grain until only the almond remained. Orgeat was also used as a sweetener in mixed alcoholic drinks of the same decades, and fountain drinks and bar drinks shared a good deal of the same syrup stock. Fountain drinks of the period were often given exotic-sounding place names; in many cases, as here, the name appears to say nothing about the ingredients.