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Coffee La Mode
Serve in a 12-ounce glass. Use 1½ ounces of syrup, fill ⅓ full of shaved , 1 ounce pure rich cream, ice, 1 ounce pure rich cream, shake thoroughly, withdraw the glass from the shake thoroughly, withdraw the glass from the shaker, allowing the syrup, etc., to remain in the shaker. Now fill, using the fine stream only, until the shaker contains sufficient to more than fill glass. Pour into glass and back once, then strain into clean glass. Much is added to the appearance of this drink if it is topped off with whipped cream. A spoonful of ice cream may be used instead.
A soda-fountain formula written for someone standing at a carbonator with a shaker, a shaved-ice bin and a rack of syrups. It translates to a home kitchen with only small adjustments.
- The hinge: draw with the fine streamFountain taps had a coarse stream for volume and a fine stream for maximum carbonation and foam. Substitute well-chilled seltzer poured slowly down the side of the shaker; a hard splash will drive the gas off and leave the drink flat.
- Syrup1½ ounces is 3 tablespoons of coffee syrup — a sweetened concentrate, not brewed coffee. Strong cold-brew concentrate cut with simple syrup to roughly the sweetness of maple syrup stands in well.
- Cream"Pure rich cream" at a fountain of this period would have been unhomogenised and richer than table milk, probably in the range of what we would now call light or coffee cream. Light cream or half-and-half stands in; heavy cream will make the drink heavy and mute the coffee.
- Shaved iceFilling the glass a third full of shaved ice means roughly 4 ounces by volume. Shaved rather than cubed matters: it chills fast and melts into the drink, which is part of the intended dilution.
- Pour and back onceTransferring the drink between shaker and glass a single time aerates it and folds the cream through the carbonated water. The instruction stops at one pass, presumably because further pouring costs carbonation.
- Strain into a clean glassThe straining removes the shaved ice so the drink is served cold but undiluted from that point on. Chill the serving glass beforehand, since there is no ice left to do the work.
- YieldOne 12-ounce drink. Whipped cream on top is the finish the recipe recommends; a spoonful of ice cream may be used instead.
American soda fountains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran on bottled flavouring syrups, and coffee syrup was a fountain staple long before iced coffee became an everyday order — it survives most visibly in Rhode Island, where coffee milk made with coffee syrup is the state drink. "À la mode" had by then drifted in American usage from its literal French sense of "in the fashion" to mean simply "with ice cream," the same shift that gave us pie à la mode. Manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser rather than the customer: they assume a carbonator with two streams, a shaved-ice bin, a shaker and a range of syrups, and they specify glass sizes in ounces.