Home › At the Fountain › Apricot Cream
Apricot Cream
Draw 2 ounces above syrup in a glass with either plain or ice cream, and draw fine and coarse stream soda to fill glass. Careless clerks should not be employed at your fountain. Absolute neatness in dress should be insisted upon.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen one: it assumes a marble counter with carbonated-water taps and a row of syrup pumps at the operator's elbow. All of it translates to a home glass with a little interpretation.
- "Above syrup"The instruction refers back to an apricot syrup formula given earlier in the book. Any thick apricot syrup works — cooked-down apricot puree strained and sweetened to roughly equal parts sugar, or a good bottled apricot syrup.
- 2 ouncesFluid ounces, so a quarter cup — a generous pour by modern standards, intended for a fountain glass.
- "With either plain or ice cream"The choice is between plain sweet cream stirred in, giving a smooth drink, or a scoop of ice cream, giving a float. "Cream" here means dairy cream, not the flavour now sold under that name.
- Fine and coarse streamFountain draft arms offered two draws, a fine stream and a coarse one, and formulas routinely called for both. At home, add a splash of seltzer and stir to loosen the syrup, then top up in one steady pour.
- Order of operationsSyrup first, cream second, soda last, as the recipe has it.
- The clerk's adviceThe last two sentences are not part of the drink; they are counter-management remarks addressed to the proprietor rather than instructions for the glass.
- YieldOne glass. Scaled up for a pitcher, keep the syrup and cream in the glasses and carbonate at the last moment; premixed, it goes flat and cloying within minutes.
The American soda fountain flourished from the 1890s through the 1920s, when the drugstore counter was both a dispensary and a social room, and manuals like this one existed to give the dispenser a stock of formulas he could throw together in seconds. Fruit "creams" — a flavored syrup, a dose of sweet cream, and carbonated water — were the workhorse of that list. The instruction to draw fine stream before coarse reflects equipment that no longer exists in most kitchens: twin-draw taps, which let a dispenser blend the cream and syrup before filling. The digressions on neatness and careless clerks are equally of the period, when a fountain's reputation rested on visible cleanliness at a time when the public was newly conscious of food handling.