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Cream (Dilute the contents of a can)
Dilute the contents of a can of American Evaporated Cream with 5 ounces of water. Where genuine cream cannot be obtained, the following is an excellent substitute:- Pure Milk, 2 quarts; Cornstarch, 6 teaspoonfuls; Egg, 1. Mix the cornstarch with a little milk, and beat up the egg thoroughly, not to burn. To before mixing. Scald the whole together, being careful not to burn. To make a cream syrup, add 3½ pounds of sugar to the above quantity. Do not have your syrup too thick, as it does not mix well.
A soda fountain's working cream, in two versions: thinned canned cream, or a cooked mock cream built on milk, cornstarch and egg. The text is garbled in the middle, so read the method before you start.
- The garbled line"Beat up the egg thoroughly, not to burn. To before mixing" is a typesetting error, with a phrase repeated out of place. The intended sequence is: slake the cornstarch in a little cold milk, beat the egg separately, combine both with the remaining milk, then scald the whole without letting it catch.
- Evaporated creamCanned "evaporated cream" of the period was what we now sell as evaporated milk — unsweetened, concentrated, sterilised in the can. Do not substitute sweetened condensed milk. Modern cans are commonly 12 fl oz (smaller 5 fl oz cans are also sold), and the original gives no can size, so treat 5 ounces of water as a starting ratio rather than a rule and dilute to the consistency you want.
- Scald means 180FScald -- Scalding milk is conventionally taken as around 180F, when it steams and shivers at the edges but does not boil; the book itself gives no temperature. Starch begins to thicken in that range, and the egg will curdle if the mixture goes much past it. Stir constantly over moderate heat, or use a double boiler; "careful not to burn" is the whole warning the original gives, and milk with starch in it scorches fast.
- QuantitiesSix teaspoonfuls is two tablespoons of cornstarch to two quarts of milk — a very light body, meant to give the mouthfeel of cream rather than a pudding. One egg in two quarts likewise reads as richness, not thickening.
- The cream syrupThree and a half pounds of sugar into two quarts of the mock cream is roughly 8 cups of sugar, a fountain-strength syrup intended to be dosed by the ounce into a glass and topped with carbonated water. It is not a pouring cream. Dissolve the sugar while the mixture is hot and follow the final instruction: thinner mixes and draws better than thick.
- Keeping itThis is an uncured dairy preparation with egg in it and no preservative. Fountains of the period relied on ice for cooling; refrigerate below 40F, make no more than you will use in two or three days, and discard it if it thickens, sours or separates.
- YieldThe milk version makes about two quarts of cream substitute, or close to three quarts once the sugar is dissolved into it — enough for several dozen fountain drinks.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the home cook, and they are full of workarounds for ingredients a busy shop could not keep sweet. Cream was the worst offender: unpasteurised, unrefrigerated beyond a block of ice, and expensive. Canned evaporated milk, commercialised in the United States in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and sold under names including "evaporated cream," solved that problem by putting a shelf-stable dairy concentrate in every storeroom, and fountain books adopted it quickly. The cornstarch-and-egg formula behind it belongs to a much older family of mock creams found in nineteenth-century household manuals, where starch supplied body and a single egg supplied the yellow colour and mouthfeel that butterfat otherwise would. That it appears here as a syrup, measured in pounds of sugar per two quarts, is a reminder that fountain "cream" was a dosing ingredient for ice cream sodas and cream sodas, not something anyone drank straight.