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American Frappe
One ounce mint syrup, 1 ounce wintergreen syrup, 1 ounce sweet cream, ladleful of soft ice cream. Shake well, strain, use fine stream soda, serve in regular frappe style, top with whipped cream.
A shaken fountain drink from the era when the dispenser had a marble counter, a draft arm with several stream settings, and a tub of hand-packed ice cream at his elbow. It is one glass, and it scales badly, so make them one at a time.
- The ounces are fluid ouncesEach ounce is 2 tablespoons, so the drink starts with 4 tablespoons of syrup and 2 of cream. Fountain syrups were generally heavier than a modern bar syrup; if yours is thinner the drink will be correspondingly lighter.
- "Ladleful of soft ice cream"The fountain ladle is usually reckoned at something like 1.5 to 2 fluid ounces, so figure 3 to 4 tablespoons. "Soft" means ice cream tempered at the counter until it was scoopable and slightly slumping, not soft-serve from a machine.
- Fine stream sodaDraft arms offered coarse and fine streams. The fine stream is a narrow jet used to work up foam; the nearest equivalent is pouring well-chilled seltzer down the side of the glass in a thin stream, or using a siphon.
- Shake, then strainA cocktail shaker works. Shake the syrups, cream and ice cream just long enough to homogenize — ten seconds or so — and strain into the glass before adding the soda, as the recipe directs.
- What "frappe style" meant hereNot the New England frappe (a thick milkshake) and not French frappé over crushed ice. In fountain usage the term covered a shaken, strained drink finished with soda; the recipe itself names no glass or size.
- Wintergreen syrupBuy a food-grade wintergreen flavoring syrup or make one from an extract sold for food use. Undiluted oil of wintergreen is nearly pure methyl salicylate and is toxic by the teaspoon; it is not an ingredient for the home kitchen, however freely the old trade handled it.
- Mint syrupFountain mint syrup was peppermint-flavored and often tinted green, closer to a candy-cane note than to fresh spearmint leaves. A steeped fresh-mint syrup will read as a different drink entirely — pleasant, but not this one.
- YieldOne glass. Top with whipped cream that is barely sweetened; the base already carries four tablespoons of syrup.
Wintergreen and mint were both stock flavors of the American soda fountain: Gaultheria procumbens, the eastern teaberry, is a North American woodland plant whose flavor Americans knew from teaberry gum, birch beer and pink wintergreen lozenges long before it reached a syrup pump. Fountain manuals of this type were trade books, written for the dispenser behind a drugstore counter rather than for the household cook, which is why the measures assume a pump that throws a known ounce and a ladle of a known size. Soda dispensing had grown out of the pharmacy's mineral-water trade. Formulas like this one exist to be memorized and thrown together in under a minute, which accounts for the telegraphic style: shake, strain, fine stream, top.