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Whipped Cream Shake
Have two glasses: into one put two tablespoonfuls of any flavored syrup and half fill with soda water. Into the other glass put six tablespoonfuls of whipped cream. Blend well by pouring from glass to glass.
A soda-fountain drink built by pouring rather than shaking. Everything hinges on carbonation and cold, so have both glasses and all ingredients chilled before you start.
- The pour is the whole techniqueWithout a shaker, the back-and-forth pour is what emulsifies the cream into the soda. Two or three transfers is enough; keep going and you knock out the gas and end up with sweet cream soup.
- Use tall glassesWhipped cream meeting carbonated water foams hard and fast. Two 12- to 16-ounce glasses give you room to pour without losing half of it over the side.
- "Soda water" hereAt the time this meant water charged at the fountain or drawn from a siphon, generally carbonated harder than most bottled club soda today. Seltzer from a siphon or a home carbonator comes closest; flat mineral water will not work.
- Flavored syrupFountain syrups of the period were typically heavy, often in the region of two parts sugar to one part water, with fruit or extract added, thicker and sweeter than a modern coffee syrup. Grenadine, raspberry, vanilla or a good fruit syrup all suit; adjust down if your syrup is thin.
- The whipped creamSix tablespoons means cream already whipped, to soft peaks. The recipe does not say whether it is sweetened, and the syrup already carries the sugar. Six tablespoons is three-eighths of a cup whipped, from roughly three tablespoons of heavy cream. Aerosol cream is mostly air and stabilizers and collapses in the glass.
- Yield and servingOne drink, coming to roughly 10 ounces if you use a glass of the size suggested above. Serve at once with a straw and a spoon; the foam separates quickly.
- No egg, despite the sectionThe recipe contains no egg although it sits among the egg drinks, belonging to the same fountain family of shaken, foamed drinks. Egg white was sometimes shaken into drinks of this kind for a fuller texture, though that makes it a raw-egg drink and is worth knowing before you make it.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon appeared in 1919, the year the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, and its title is a joke about climbing aboard the wagon along with the rest of the country. Books like it were written to persuade hosts that a dry sideboard need not be a dull one, and the model they reached for was the American drugstore soda fountain, which by then had spent decades perfecting syrups, charged water and whipped cream into a repertoire of hundreds of drinks. The "shake" name predates the electric drink mixer in common home use, and this recipe shows the older method plainly: aeration by pouring between two vessels, a trick often said to have been used by fountain clerks with egg drinks and one still seen in the throwing of Spanish cider and Indian chai.