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Cafe Boushea
Serve in a 12-ounce glass. One-half fluid ounce of coffee, fill half full of fine shaved ice, sugar or simple syrup to sweeten to taste, fill glass with milk and shake thoroughly and then top off with nutmeg or cinnamon and serve with straws.
A fountain drink, built in the glass and shaken — essentially an iced latte a century before the term existed. The whole thing hinges on what "coffee" meant behind the counter.
- The coffee is a concentrateHalf a fluid ounce is a tablespoon; brewed drip coffee at that volume would vanish into the milk. Fountain recipes of this kind generally called for coffee syrup or coffee extract, a sweetened concentrate. A ristretto shot or a tablespoon of cold-brew concentrate reads closest.
- Sweetening twiceIf you use a commercial coffee syrup it already carries sugar, so taste before adding more. Fountain syrups were often heavier than the 1:1 kitchen standard, so a given measure may sweeten more than you expect; the recipe leaves the amount to taste.
- Shaved ice, not cubesFine shaved ice is what lets the drink shake to a uniform chill and a slight froth in seconds. Cubes chill and dilute less, giving a different result. Pulsed ice or a small handful of crushed is the nearest match.
- Shaking milkWhole milk shaken hard aerates into a light foam that settles quickly. Shake ten to fifteen seconds and pour at once; the head is the point, and it collapses within a minute or two.
- The spice on topGrate the nutmeg fresh over the foam rather than dusting from a jar — pre-ground nutmeg is flat and tends to sink. Cinnamon is the alternative, not an addition.
- Vessel and yieldA 12-ounce glass makes one drink. Half of it is ice, so the finished volume of liquid is closer to seven or eight ounces once it settles.
Soda fountain manuals of this era catalogued many small formulas like this one, often given names with a bit of continental gloss — "Cafe Boushea" looks like a phonetic English spelling of a French-sounding word, though the origin of the name is not certain. The fountain was one place where American coffee drinking went cold and sweet: coffee extract sat alongside vanilla, chocolate and the fruit syrups, and was treated as another flavour to be built with ice and milk. Recipes of this shape were common in the early twentieth century, and they anticipate the iced coffee drinks sold today, down to the shaken milk and the dusting of nutmeg.