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After Dinners
Powderette. Serve in pousse cafe glass, two-thirds full of crême de coco, float sweet cream on top. An easy way to lay the cream is to pour it into a teaspoon, holding the spoon just at the surface of the cordial. Marshmallow. -Pousse cafe glass two-thirds full of maraschino, float sweet cream on top. White Cap. Pousse cafe glass two-thirds full of crême de y'vette, float sweet cream on top. Kentucky Rosebud.--Same as above, only use crême de rose.
Four variations on a single trick: a small stemmed glass of sweet cordial with a cap of cream floated on top. The whole thing lives or dies on the float.
- The glassA pousse-cafe glass is a narrow footed glass of about 2 to 3 oz, taller than it is wide. The narrowness is functional — it keeps the cream in a tight disc instead of letting it spread and sink. A cordial or small sherry glass will do; a wide coupe will not.
- The float is the whole recipeFill only two-thirds, rest the bowl of a teaspoon on the surface of the cordial, and pour the cream into the spoon so it overflows gently rather than dropping. Sugar-heavy liqueurs are denser than cream, which is why this works at all; pour fast and you punch through the layer.
- Sweet creamIn fountain usage this means fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to sour cream — not whipped and not sweetened. Heavy cream floats most reliably; half-and-half is thin enough to break the line.
- Creme de cocoThe name may point to either cacao or coconut. A white creme de cacao is a plausible reading given the company it keeps here, and its sugar load should make it one of the easier of the four to float on.
- Creme d'YvetteA violet liqueur, generally attributed to Charles Jacquin et Cie of Philadelphia. It left the market for decades in the late twentieth century before being reissued, so older bar books calling for it were long unmakeable. Creme de violette is the usual stand-in.
- Creme de roseA rose-petal cordial that has largely vanished as a commercial category. Modern rose liqueurs vary widely in sugar and some are too light to hold a cream cap; check by floating a spoonful before building the drink.
- MaraschinoThe cherry-stone liqueur, clear and only moderately sweet — not the red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Build it to order and drink it at once.
- Yield and serviceEach entry is one glass, on the order of 1.5 oz of cordial and something under an ounce of cream, depending on the glass. The section title places them after a meal.
Layered cordial drinks — the pousse-cafe, a French name usually read as "coffee-pusher," for what followed the coffee at the end of dinner — passed readily between bar and fountain in this period, since they required only a steady hand and no ice, shaker or skill with a jigger. These four are the simplest form of it: two strata rather than the show-off six or seven of the saloon versions, and all four built on the same instruction, with only the cordial changed. The names read like signage rather than cocktail lore — Powderette, White Cap, Kentucky Rosebud — which is how variety was sold without stocking anything extra. A section of after-dinner cordials in a book of this kind is a reminder that the drugstore and bar trades overlapped considerably.