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Crushed Fruits-Ice Cream Soda
Place spoonful of ice cream in a soda glass, add ladleful of crushed fruit, any flavor; fill glass with fine and coarse stream. Soda water is a veritable luxury and, when proper materials are used and the drink is scientifically dispensed, there is nothing half so delicious. drink is scientifically dispensed, there is nothing half so delicious. At all times use "American Whole" and "Crushed Fruits," "Concentrated Fruit Syrups," "Fruit Phosphates," "Fruit Floss," etc., as they are the very best that can be obtained.
This is a fountain assembly rather than a cooked recipe, and nearly all of its instructions are written in the vocabulary of equipment that no longer sits on the average counter. The order of operations is the whole trick.
- Fine and coarse streamA fountain draft arm had two outlets: a coarse stream of nearly still carbonated water for volume, and a fine stream that broke into froth. Working from a bottle, pour a splash of seltzer forcefully onto the crushed fruit and stir to combine, then top with a gentle pour to raise the head. Fountain water was more heavily charged than most bottled soda water off the shelf, so the foam will be shorter-lived.
- Crushed fruitNot fresh fruit. Fountain "crushed fruits" were pieces of fruit packed in heavy sugar syrup, thick enough to hold a ladle's shape and sweet enough to survive dilution. Fresh berries mashed with an equal weight of sugar and left an hour will stand in for them; unsweetened fruit will read as thin and sour once diluted.
- LadlefulFountain ladles were sold by size; roughly 1 to 1.5 fluid ounces is a reasonable reading here. The text says only "spoonful" of ice cream; a small scoop of about 1/4 cup will serve.
- Glass sizePeriod soda glasses commonly held somewhere around 10 to 12 ounces, often flaring at the top. Filling a straight-sided modern glass to the brim will overflow the moment the fine stream hits the cream.
- PhosphatesThe "fruit phosphates" named in the closing line were syrups dosed with acid phosphate, a sour agent that sharpens sweet syrup the way lemon juice does but without flavor of its own. It is still sold to bartenders; a few drops of lemon juice is the nearest kitchen equivalent.
- The advertising"American Whole," "Fruit Floss" and the rest read as proprietary trade names rather than generic categories, and the closing sentence functions as a plug for a supplier's line. Read it as a catalog listing rather than as an ingredient specification.
- YieldOne glass. Add the cream first as written, since a scoop dropped onto carbonated water will foam over the rim.
Books like this one were trade manuals, published to teach the apprentice dispenser behind a drugstore counter and, not incidentally, to sell him syrups. The ice cream soda dates to the American fountain trade of the 1870s, and the story most often repeated traces it to Robert Green in Philadelphia in 1874, though the claim rests largely on his own later telling and other dispensers made competing claims. What the page really documents is the language of the trade at its height: carbonated water was a manufactured luxury, dispensed by a man who thought of himself as practicing a technique, and the word "scientifically" was doing a lot of commercial work. Soda fountains flourished in American pharmacies for decades, and the association of the dispenser with the druggist is why the vocabulary here sounds half culinary and half chemical.