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Chocolate Punch
This is a Great Success at one of the Largest Fountains of the South. Granulated Gelatin, ¾ ounce; Water, 5 quarts; Syrup, 2 quarts; Egg, whites only, 2; Lemon, juice of, 3; American Cream Chocolate, 3 pints; Santa Croix Rum, 3 ounces. Dissolve the gelatin in 1 quart of boiling water. Mix this with the syrup, and to the rest of the cold water add the beaten whites of 2 eggs, the lemons and the rum. Mix all thoroughly. Put in freezer and freeze almost hard, then open freezer, pour in the chocolate and freeze very hard. When frozen pack in cabinet or in tub with ice and salt. To serve, fill a cocktail glass with this chocolate punch, add spoonful of whipped cream, and serve with a spoon.
A frozen fountain punch from the era when a soda counter kept a hand-crank freezer going all day. Most of it translates cleanly, but the egg whites do not: they go into cold water and are never heated at any stage, so the finished punch is a raw-egg preparation held for hours at fountain temperature.
- Why the eggs are the problemThe two beaten whites are added to cold water and then frozen. Nothing in the process brings them anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it either — it only holds it. A batch this size was meant to sit in an ice-and-salt cabinet being dipped from repeatedly, which is the opposite of a controlled cold chain. Use a current recipe built around pasteurized whites if you want this style of frozen punch.
- On the gelatinThe gelatin is ¾ ounce, as the printed page gives it. That is roughly three envelopes of modern powdered gelatin for a seven-quart batch, enough for a light body rather than a jelly.
- "Syrup" means fountain simple syrupIn a soda book an unqualified "syrup" is the house sugar syrup, generally around two parts sugar to one part water by weight and considerably heavier than a modern 1:1. Two quarts of it is the entire sweetening for the batch.
- American Cream ChocolateA proprietary fountain chocolate preparation: a thick sweetened chocolate syrup of the kind a soda counter kept on hand, either bought in or compounded in-house from a trade formula. Composition varied and there is no exact shelf equivalent; modern commercial chocolate syrup is thinner and less rich.
- Santa Croix rumSanta Cruz, that is St. Croix rum, from the island that was then the Danish West Indies. Three ounces in a batch this size is a flavoring, not a spirit measure, and it will barely affect the freezing point.
- Freezer and cabinet"Put in freezer" means the ice-and-salt can with a dasher, not a modern appliance; "pack in cabinet" means transferring the frozen punch to an insulated ice-packed holding box behind the counter. "Freeze almost hard" is the soft-serve stage at which the chocolate can still be worked in.
- ScaleSeven quarts of water and syrup before churning, with three pints of chocolate added part-way through, so something over eight quarts finished. Served in cocktail glasses that is many dozens of servings. It is a commercial batch, not a household one.
Frozen "punches" like this belong to the American soda fountain at its most ambitious, when a drugstore counter competed with the saloon and the ice cream parlor at once and kept a repertoire of ices, sherbets and half-frozen punches alongside the phosphates. The gelatin and egg white are there for texture rather than flavor: both keep a low-fat, high-sugar mixture smooth in the can and slow the collapse into coarse ice crystals once it is packed away. The three ounces of St. Croix rum suggest, though they hardly prove, that this predates Prohibition, when a fountain could still reach for a bottle of spirits to top off a flavor without comment. The boast in the first line — a great success at one of the largest fountains of the South — hints at how these compilations are generally thought to have been assembled: formulas traded, bought or simply copied from working dispensers and printed as trade intelligence for anyone running a counter.