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Charlotte Russe
A Ladies' Drink.
Put ½ to 2 ounces of vanilla syrup, a little ice cream, shake up well in shaker, pour into glass and fill with soda water very creamy (nearly full), then fill with whipped cream, flavor with vanilla and serve with spoon.
A fountain drink rather than a dessert, built in a shaker and finished at the glass. The whole thing depends on the soda going in hard enough to foam the ice cream without melting it.
- The quantity is probably a typoThe quantity as printed is odd -- "½ to 2 ounces" is a very wide range for a flavoring syrup. It may be a misprint for 1½ to 2 ounces, i.e. 3 to 4 tablespoons, but the text as given cannot be corrected with certainty.
- Vanilla syrupFountain vanilla syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, considerably denser than the thin coffee-shop syrups sold now. If you use a commercial syrup, expect to need more of it.
- "A little ice cream"About a tablespoon or a small scoop. Its job is to emulsify and cloud the drink, not to sit in it as a float, so it should be soft enough to break up in the shaker.
- Soda water "very creamy"At the fountain, "creamy" or "fine stream" meant drawing the carbonated water through the small aperture to raise foam, as against the "coarse stream" used to fill. With a siphon or a bottle, pour down the side at first and then straight into the middle to build the head.
- The whipped creamWhip to soft peaks and flavor with a few drops of vanilla; if your ice cream and syrup are already sweet, leave the cream unsweetened. Stiffly beaten cream will sit on top like a lid instead of merging into the foam.
- Glass and yieldOne drink. The recipe does not name a glass; a tall soda glass suits it. Serve with a long spoon and drink it at once, as the foam collapses quickly.
The name is borrowed from the dessert, a mold of ladyfingers or sponge filled with Bavarian cream, generally credited to the cook Antonin Carême and usually explained as a compliment to a Russian patron or to Tsar Alexander I. Fountain men of the late nineteenth century seem often to have lifted dessert names for drinks that merely suggested them, and this one earns the title only through its vanilla cream and its cap of whipped cream. The label "a ladies' drink" is worth noticing: soda fountains marketed themselves as respectable alternatives to the saloon, and it is often said that their trade manuals sorted drinks by the customer expected to order them, with the creamier, sweeter, spoon-served concoctions assigned to women and the sharp phosphates and ginger drinks to men.