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Banana Cream
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Banana Syrup, 2 ounces; Cream of Milk, 8 ounces. Shake well, add a few small pieces of banana fruit, and fill with soda water, using the fine stream, and serve in a 12-ounce tumbler with spoon and straw. This is a seller.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: it assumes a marble counter, a draft arm with coarse and fine streams, and syrups kept in pumps at hand. Everything here translates, but the vessel sizes and the dairy terms need decoding.
- The 12-ounce tumbler is the constraintThe listed liquids alone come to ten ounces before any soda water, and the shaved ice adds more volume still, so the glass is close to full before the soda goes in. The text says to fill with soda water; in practice that leaves room for very little. Shaking implies a shaker or mixing glass, with the drink then poured into the serving tumbler and finished with soda.
- "Cream of milk"Generally taken to mean the rich top of unhomogenised milk — roughly what we would call half-and-half or light cream, not whipping cream. Eight ounces of modern heavy cream would make this cloying; half-and-half is the closer match.
- Banana syrupPeriod fountain syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured largely with amyl acetate, the ester that gives banana candy its scent, sometimes with a little fruit pulp. Modern banana syrups run sweeter and thinner; two ounces in a twelve-ounce glass is a lot, and an ounce and a half is a safer starting point.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved or finely cracked ice is what makes the drink chill and dilute instantly in the shaker. Cubes shaken for the same time will underchill and then water the glass down as they melt in it.
- The fine streamFountain arms offered a coarse stream for agitation and a fine one for gentle filling. Fine stream here means pour the soda slowly down the side so the carbonation stays in the drink and the cream does not foam over the rim.
- Add the fruit lastThe small pieces of banana go in after shaking, not before — shaken with ice they break down into brown pulp. Cut them at the moment of serving, since cut banana darkens within minutes.
- YieldOne 12-ounce drink. Serve immediately; cream and carbonation both fail quickly, and a banana cream left standing separates.
Fountain manuals of this kind were trade literature, written for the dispenser behind the counter rather than the cook at home, which is why the entry closes with a note on salability rather than on flavour. Cream drinks may well have been the fountain's answer to a problem of profit and appetite: plain soda and syrup was cheap and quickly drunk, while a shaken cream soda plausibly commanded a higher price and felt like a meal. Bananas were the novelty ingredient of the era — steam shipping and refrigerated rail had turned them from a curiosity into a staple within a few decades, and artificial banana flavour was a fixture of the syrup bottle. The instruction to add real banana pieces on top of the syrup may have served as a kind of merchandising: proof at the counter that the drink had fruit in it.