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Coffee Sundae
Make a rich syrup of coffee and pour over vanilla ice cream.
A two-line fountain formula that assumes the counterman already knows how to build a syrup. The whole dish rests on the syrup being concentrated enough to read as coffee against cold sweet cream.
- What "rich syrup" meansThe recipe gives no proportions. A workable modern ratio is about 2 cups sugar stirred into 2 cups of very strong hot coffee, warmed only until clear; period fountain stock syrups were often heavier still. Anything weaker disappears under the ice cream.
- Brew it stronger than you would drink itSugar and cold both blunt coffee flavour. Use roughly double your normal brewing strength, or steep coarse grounds overnight and use the concentrate; the syrup should taste almost harsh on its own.
- Do not boil it downReducing coffee over heat drives off the aromatics and leaves bitterness and a scorched note. Concentrate at the brewing stage, then heat only enough to dissolve the sugar.
- Cool completelyWarm syrup on ice cream produces soup rather than the distinct ribbon a sundae wants. Chill the syrup thoroughly before serving; refrigerated in a clean bottle it should keep a week or so.
- PortionReckon on two small scoops with roughly 1 to 1.5 fl oz of syrup over them. The batch above yields about 24 fl oz, so fifteen to twenty servings; scale down unless you are running a counter.
- Vanilla is doing workThe recipe specifies vanilla: a plain sweet-cream base carries the coffee, while a coffee ice cream doubles up and flattens the contrast.
Soda fountains multiplied through the late nineteenth century, and by the time manuals like this one were printed the sundae was well established. For what it is worth, the claim is a story rather than an established one, that the sundae arose as the fountain's answer to Sunday sales laws and temperance pressure that restricted other trades. Fountain work was built on a pantry of house-made syrups, each held in its own pump jar, so that a dispenser could assemble dozens of named combinations from a short list of components; a coffee sundae is simply one syrup meeting one ice cream. Coffee itself was the American drink of the period, roasted and ground in vast quantity, and its appearance as a cold sweet flavouring reflects the fountain's habit of translating everything popular in a cup into something scoopable. The extreme brevity of the entry is typical of these books.