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Australian Sundae
Vanilla cream; heavy cream; in regular sundae cup; pour over ice cream, port wine syrup, with grated nuts and top off with whipped cream and maraschino cherry.
A dispenser's shorthand rather than a recipe in the domestic sense: it lists what goes in the cup, in order, and assumes you know the rest. A few of the terms need decoding.
- "Vanilla cream"Most likely fountain shorthand for vanilla ice cream rather than a custard sauce. The second phrase, "heavy cream," is unexplained in the original; it may indicate the richer of two ice creams, or simply cream added to the cup, but the text does not say.
- Port wine syrupIn fountain trade practice this was commonly a non-alcoholic flavoring syrup sold in bottles, coloured and flavoured to suggest port rather than made from it, though the recipe does not specify. A modern substitute is a reduction of ruby port with sugar, cooked down until it coats a spoon and cooled completely before it touches the ice cream.
- Grated nutsGrated, not chopped: the word implies nuts reduced to a coarse powder that clings to the syrup rather than pieces sitting on top. The recipe does not say which nuts.
- Order of assemblyAs written, the syrup goes over the ice cream before the nuts, so the nuts stick; whipped cream and the cherry go on last.
- Maraschino cherriesThe cherries of this era were preserved in maraschino liqueur or, increasingly, in sulfur brine and colored. Today's version is a sweeter, softer product; a good brandied or Luxardo-style cherry is closer to what the counterman reached for.
- YieldOne sundae. The original gives no quantities for syrup or nuts.
Soda fountain manuals of the early twentieth century are full of sundaes named for distant places, and the names rarely mean much beyond suggesting something exotic to a customer at a drugstore counter. What distinguishes this one is the port wine syrup, part of a family of fountain flavorings -- sherry, claret, port -- that imitated wines without necessarily containing them. The books that collected these formulas were trade publications, written for the dispenser rather than the housewife, which is why the instruction reads as a list of moves rather than a set of measurements: the man behind the counter already knew how much syrup a pump threw and how big the regular cup was.