Home › At the Fountain › Ambrosia Sundae
Ambrosia Sundae
Take 1 pint American Cream of Cocoanut Crushed Fruit, 2 pints simple syrup, mix them in the crushed fruit bowl on the counter, take 2 large oranges, peel them carefully and cut them up into small pieces, mix the oranges with the cocoanut in the bowl. Turn a cone-shaped measure of ice cream into a No. 54 Sundae Glass, over this put a ladleful of the mixture from bowl on counter and serve with a spoon. The combination of flavors of cocoanut and oranges make an old-fashioned Ambrosia which is truly delicious. This drink sells for 10 cents and will make a big hit. If you want to make a 15-cent article out of it, spoonful of whipped cream on top and on the very top of all place a maraschino cherry and one walnut meat from a jar of American Walnut Bisque. Simple syrup is the basis of all soda water syrups and the formula for making it is given in this book.
A fountain recipe written for a counterman with proprietary products at hand. The substitutions are straightforward, but the proportions and the holding conditions both need rethinking.
- Cream of Cocoanut Crushed FruitA branded fountain product: shredded coconut suspended in heavy sweet syrup, of the sort sold ready-made to soda fountains. Canned cream of coconut, or sweetened shredded coconut steeped in syrup until saturated, gives much the same effect.
- Simple syrup at fountain strengthSoda fountain simple syrup was considerably heavier than the 1:1 bar standard; the book gives its own formula elsewhere. Made with modern 1:1 syrup the topping will be thin and watery; a richer syrup gives a closer result, and expect it to be very sweet.
- Cut the oranges properly"Peel them carefully" means removing all pith. Better still, supreme the oranges — cut the segments free of their membranes — so the fruit does not turn stringy sitting in syrup.
- No. 54 sundae glassA supplier's catalogue number, not a size anyone would recognise now, and the capacity is not recoverable from the text. Any small tulip or footed dessert glass will do.
- Cone-shaped measureA conical dipper rather than a round scoop, giving a tapered plug of ice cream that sat neatly in the glass. Figure roughly 3 to 4 oz, about a No. 10 down to a No. 8 scoop.
- Do not hold it on the counterThe recipe has the mixture standing in a bowl on the counter. Cut oranges in syrup left at room temperature will eventually ferment; make only what you will serve and keep the bowl on ice or in the refrigerator.
- Walnut BisqueAnother of the house products, a jar of walnut meats in syrup. A syrup-poached walnut half, or simply a lightly toasted one, stands in.
- YieldThree pints of syrup and coconut plus two oranges makes roughly a quart and a half of topping, enough for a dozen to sixteen sundaes at a ladleful each. Scale down heavily for home use.
Ambrosia — oranges and grated coconut layered with sugar — is a Southern American dessert that turns up in printed cookbooks from the 1860s onward, and its spread is often linked to the arrival of cheap imported coconut and Florida citrus on Northern markets in the same decades. The name, borrowed from the food of the Greek gods, was already a stock piece of nineteenth-century menu flattery. What this version shows is the soda fountain absorbing a home dessert and re-pricing it: the fruit comes out of a branded jar, the syrup is the same base used for every drink on the counter, and the recipe ends not with a taste note but with two price points, ten cents plain and fifteen with whipped cream, a cherry and a walnut. Fountain manuals of this period were as much sales literature as cookery, and books like this one were often published by the syrup houses whose products they specify by name.