Home › At the Fountain › Cherry Bounce (Serve in ounce glass Use)
Cherry Bounce (Serve in ounce glass Use)
Serve in 12-ounce glass. Use shaker with small amount of cracked ice. Add ½ ounces American Red Cherry Syrup, 2 ounces plain cream, ¼ American Red Cherry Syrup, 2 ounces plain cream, ¼ ounce brandy, 1 dash angostura bitters, 1 egg. Shake, strain, throw ice away. Fill glass nearly full of carbonated water, 1½ from the fine stream, pour quickly to shaker and back. Top with nutmeg, and serve with a straw.
This is a soda fountain "egg drink" of the type served across a marble counter around the turn of the century, and the printed text has been mangled by the typesetter. Several things need saying before anything else.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole egg goes into the shaker and nothing in the procedure ever brings it above refrigerator temperature. Brandy at this proportion (well under an ounce in a 12-ounce glass) is nowhere near enough alcohol to inactivate Salmonella, and the drink is served immediately to be drunk through a straw. If you want an egg cream or a flip, use a current recipe written with that risk in mind.
- The text is duplicatedThe line "1½ ounces American Red Cherry Syrup, 2 ounces plain cream, ¼ American Red Cherry Syrup, 2 ounces plain cream" is a compositor's repeat: a phrase was set twice. The intended build is one measure of syrup and one of cream, but which figures are correct cannot be recovered from the page.
- "14 ounce brandy"Almost certainly a garbled fraction, most likely ¼ ounce; fourteen ounces of brandy in a twelve-ounce glass is impossible on its face. The exact figure cannot be recovered from the page.
- "1½ from the fine stream"Fountain apparatus had coarse and fine draught arms. The fine stream was the gentle one, used to top a drink without knocking the foam down; the "1½" is a stray figure with no unit attached. The following instruction, pouring quickly from glass to shaker and back, is the standard fountain trick for mixing without losing carbonation.
- American Red Cherry SyrupA sweetened, coloured fountain syrup, not the same thing as maraschino liqueur or as modern cherry cordial. Whether the name was a trade name or simply a description of the syrup is not clear from the page.
- Plain creamIn fountain usage this appears to mean unsweetened, unwhipped cream, probably somewhere in the range of today's half-and-half to light cream.
Cherry bounce proper is an old Anglo-American household cordial: sour cherries, sugar and brandy or whiskey left to steep for weeks, a staple of colonial and nineteenth-century stillrooms and often associated in tradition with Martha Washington's kitchen. By the time this book was printed the name had been borrowed by the soda fountain for something quite different, a shaken cherry-and-cream drink with a small measure of brandy and a dash of bitters, sold over the counter rather than laid down in a jar. Fountain formularies of this period frequently borrowed the names of bar drinks and household cordials for drinks rebuilt around syrup, cream, eggs and carbonated water. Egg drinks of this kind were pushed as nourishing, close kin to the egg phosphate and the eggnog, and were offered to the convalescent as readily as to the thirsty.