Home › At the Fountain › Angel Food (One ounce vanilla syrup ounce)
Angel Food (One ounce vanilla syrup ounce)
One ounce vanilla syrup, 1 ounce red orange syrup, 2 ounces ice cream, ¼ glass ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain drink from the shaker rather than the draught arm: two syrups, a scoop of ice cream and cracked ice, shaken and poured. It makes one small glass, and it depends entirely on the syrups you use.
- The measuresThe ounces are fountain measures, one ounce being roughly a single stroke of a graduated syrup pump, or 2 tablespoons. The 2 ounces of ice cream works out at about a quarter cup, though the recipe does not say whether it was measured by volume or by weight.
- "¼ glass ice"A soda fountain mixing glass ran somewhere around 10 to 12 ounces, which would make this about 2½ to 3 ounces of cracked or shaved ice, roughly a third of a cup. Cubed ice from a home tray will dilute less and chill less; crushing it gets you closer to the intended texture.
- Red orange syrupNot blood orange. Period fountain syrup lists often gave orange in both a plain and a coloured version, the red tint most likely from cochineal or one of the early coal-tar dyes. Orange syrup with a drop of red colouring reproduces it; plain orange syrup tastes the same and simply looks paler.
- Vanilla syrupFountain vanilla syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, on the order of two parts sugar to one of water, flavoured with vanilla. Modern coffee-bar vanilla syrup is usually thinner and less sweet, so the drink may come out looser and flatter than intended.
- TossAfter straining, the drink was poured back and forth between two vessels a few times. This aerates the mixture and raises a light foam. Skipping it leaves a thinner, more separated glass.
- No soda waterAs written this is a shaken drink, not a soda. If you want it long, strain into a tall glass and top with carbonated water, but that makes it a different item on the fountain menu.
- YieldOne glass of about 5 to 6 ounces, meant to be drunk immediately while the foam holds.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were written for the dispenser behind the counter, not the home cook, which is why the instructions are so terse: the man reading it already knew what shake, strain and toss meant with a mixing glass in his hand. Names like Angel Food were borrowed freely from the bakery and the dessert table, where angel food was an American sweet of the same decades, prized for being pale and airy, while at the fountain it was whatever the house wanted for that season, so the same name can mean quite different things from one book to the next. The heavy reliance on bottled flavouring syrups reflects a trade supplied by wholesale houses that are generally said to have offered a great many varieties, fruit and floral and medicinal, in matched pumps along the marble counter.