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Buffalo Sherry Cobbler
One spoonful powdered sugar, 1 ounce pineapple syrup, ¼ glass ice, 5 dashes sherry wine. Add plain soda within 1 ounce of top. Add slice of orange or lemon. Then add port wine to fill. Do not stir, and you will have a very pretty drink.
A fountain drink built in layers rather than shaken, so the assembly order matters more than the exact measures. Everything here is scaled to a single tall soda glass.
- The glassA soda fountain glass of this era might hold something on the order of 8 to 12 ounces. "¼ glass ice" means filling to about a quarter depth, and "within 1 ounce of top" leaves headroom for the port float.
- Dashes and spoonfulsA dash is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 teaspoon, so five dashes of sherry is a flavor accent rather than a pour. The "spoonful" of sugar is presumably a bar spoon, roughly a teaspoon.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain usage this meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine sugar is the closest match, and simple syrup does the same job without grit.
- Pineapple syrupA sweetened fountain syrup, thicker and more concentrated than juice. Substituting straight pineapple juice will leave the drink thin and sour; use a bottled pineapple soda syrup or cook down juice with an equal weight of sugar.
- Plain sodaUnflavored carbonated water drawn from the fountain. Seltzer poured hard down the side of the glass gives the same lift; club soda works but adds a faint mineral edge.
- The hinge: do not stirThe whole point is stratification. Pour the port slowly over the back of a spoon so it sits as a dark cap on the pale body, and send it out with a straw and a long spoon so the drinker mixes it themselves.
- Which port and sherryA ruby port gives the color contrast the recipe is after; tawny reads muddy against pineapple. An amontillado or cream sherry stands up to the sugar better than a dry fino.
- IceCrushed or shaved ice, as a fountain would have used. Cubes leave gaps that let the port sink straight through and ruin the layering.
- YieldOne drink. The alcohol total is small, roughly an ounce or less counting the port fill.
The cobbler was one of the defining American drinks of the mid-nineteenth century: wine, sugar, citrus and a mound of crushed ice, drunk through a straw. The sherry cobbler in particular became a national emblem abroad after Dickens gave it an admiring paragraph in Martin Chuzzlewit in 1844, and it is often credited with popularizing the drinking straw itself. By the time soda fountain manuals like this one were compiled, the cobbler had migrated from the bar to the fountain counter, where soda water replaced part of the wine and the whole thing became a mostly-soft drink with a decorative alcoholic top. The "Buffalo" is almost certainly a house or city name attached to a local variation rather than any ingredient; fountain books of the period are full of such regional christenings, with the same handful of syrups reshuffled under new titles.