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Frappeed Fruit
One ounce granulated gelatin, juice of 6 lemons, beaten whites of 2 eggs, 5 quarts water, 1 quart syrup, 8 ounces maraschino cherries, ounces sliced eggs, ounces maraschino cherries, 4 ounces sliced peach, 4 ounces sliced pineapple , 4 ounces whole strawberries, 4 ounces sliced orange. Dissolve the gelatin in 1 quart boiling hot water, add the syrup and the balance of the water, add the whites of the eggs and lemon juice. Put in freezer and freeze almost hard, then add the fruits and freeze very hard. Serve in a silver sherbet cup with a spoon.
A soda-fountain frappé from the days when a dispenser froze his own ices in a hand-cranked tub. The ingredient list as printed is garbled, and the method leaves raw egg white uncooked in the finished dessert.
- Why this one failsThe two egg whites are beaten and stirred into a liquid that has already been diluted with four quarts of cold water and syrup, so nothing in the mix ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not destroy it; it preserves it. A dessert of this kind should be made from a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue base.
- The printed list is corrupt"8 ounces maraschino cherries" appears once, then "ounces sliced eggs, ounces maraschino cherries" with no figures at all. "Sliced eggs" is almost certainly a typesetter's mangling of another fruit line. The quantities in those two phrases cannot be recovered, so treat them as lost rather than guessing.
- "Syrup" means fountain syrupIn a soda book an unqualified quart of syrup is most likely the plain bulk simple syrup kept behind the counter; its exact sugar-to-water proportion is not stated here and varied from book to book. It is the main sweetener apart from whatever syrup comes with the cherries.
- "Freezer" means an ice-and-salt tub"Freezer" here means the ice-cream freezer of the trade rather than a modern appliance: usually a metal can set in a bucket packed with crushed ice and rock salt and turned by crank, though larger fountains had brine-cooled equipment. "Freeze almost hard" is presumably the stage at which the mixture is stiff but still workable, so the fruit can be stirred in and stay suspended.
- Granulated gelatinOne ounce is about four modern quarter-ounce envelopes. At that strength in six quarts of liquid the gelatin is there for body and a slight chew, not to set the mixture — a frappé should still be spoonable.
- YieldSix quarts of liquid before fruit. Depending on the size of the cup, that is somewhere upward of two dozen servings. The original assumes a commercial counter, not a household table.
Frappé is the past participle of frapper, to strike, used of iced or chilled drinks — at the American soda fountain the word covered both semi-frozen drinks and coarse, half-frozen ices served in a stemmed cup with a spoon, somewhere between a water ice and a drink. Books like this one were trade manuals: they taught the dispenser to work from the same stock of bulk simple syrup, crushed fruit and jarred maraschino cherries that supplied the sodas and sundaes, so a frappé was largely an exercise in combining what was already open on the counter. The beaten egg whites are a way of lightening a frozen mixture without cream, and the direction to serve in a silver sherbet cup is a reminder that the fountain of the early twentieth century was selling ceremony along with refreshment — the drugstore counter as a respectable substitute for the saloon.