The Woodward
Mix two tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup with one tablespoonful of grapenuts (the breakfast food). Pour over vanilla ice cream and decorate with a cherry.
A soda-fountain sundae of three moving parts, so the only real questions are proportion and timing.
- Grape-Nuts is still Grape-NutsThe original recipe pauses to gloss it as "the breakfast food". The cereal, introduced in 1897, was already widely advertised by this period. The modern product is essentially the same hard, malty nugget and works as intended here, as a crunch rather than a flavour.
- Assemble at the last secondThe cereal softens once it sits in wet syrup. Mix the syrup and Grape-Nuts, pour, and serve immediately; there is no holding this.
- Proportions and yieldTwo tablespoons syrup to one tablespoon cereal makes a single sundae; the recipe does not say how much ice cream. Scaling up is a matter of multiplying, but mix each portion's syrup and cereal separately rather than making a batch.
- The syrupA fountain chocolate syrup was a thin, pourable syrup rather than a modern squeeze-bottle fudge sauce, which will sit on top in a lump. Thin a heavy sauce with a little hot water, or use a pourable chocolate syrup.
- The cherry"A cherry" here means a maraschino. Both liqueur-preserved and brined-and-dyed cherries were being sold under that name at this date; a modern cocktail cherry is the direct descendant, and a good brandied cherry is closer to the older style.
- Ice cream temperatureServe the vanilla firm and straight from the freezer. Anything soft enough to slump will absorb the syrup and drown the cereal, which is the entire point of the dish.
This comes from a book of non-alcoholic fountain drinks and sundaes published in the run-up to national Prohibition, when the soda fountain was being promoted as the respectable replacement for the saloon — hence the title's water wagon. Sundaes at that period were named after streets, hotels, local worthies and regular customers, and the names travelled from one fountain manual to the next without explanation; "The Woodward" is not a name we can now explain. What makes the recipe interesting is the Grape-Nuts: C. W. Post's cereal dated from 1897 and was heavily advertised as a health food. The idea of cereal on ice cream, which reads as modern, is over a century old.