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Frosted Chocolate
One and one-half ounces chocolate syrup, ½ glass fine shaved ice. Shake Then add coarse and fine streams to fill 12-ounce glasses.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: it assumes a carbonated water draft arm with two taps and a shaker at hand. Everything translates, but the equipment names need decoding.
- Coarse and fine streamsFountain draft arms had two outlets: a coarse stream (a heavy flow) and a fine stream (a forceful spray that agitated the syrup and raised a head). The order here is not certain — manuals differ on whether the fine stream came first to mix or last to foam — but the recipe's wording suggests coarse then fine. With a home siphon or a bottle of seltzer, pour hard down the side of the glass first, then trickle the last inch from height.
- "Half a glass" of iceThe only glass named is the 12-ounce serving glass, so this is presumably about 6 ounces by volume of shaved ice, packed loose (though a shaker or mixing glass cannot be ruled out). Shaved, not cubed, the fine texture is what lets the shake chill and slightly dilute the syrup in a few seconds.
- Chocolate syrupFountain chocolate syrup of the period was cooked from cocoa, sugar and water, often with a pinch of salt and sometimes vanilla, and was typically thicker than modern squeeze-bottle ice cream topping. Commercial syrup will work; consider a small pinch of salt to cut the sweetness.
- An ounce and a half is not muchFor a 12-ounce glass this is a lightly flavoured drink by current expectations. Fountain syrup pumps commonly delivered around an ounce per stroke, so this is roughly a stroke and a half. Two ounces makes a fuller drink without turning it into a soda-shop shake.
- The shake is shortShake only until the syrup and ice are combined, a few seconds. Prolonged shaking melts the shaved ice and you lose both the chill and the volume that the soda water is meant to fill.
- Frosted means frosted"Frosted" was fountain usage for a drink shaken up with shaved ice, and is often explained as referring to the frost on a chilled glass, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. It does not mean frosting or ice cream: adding ice cream makes it a chocolate ice cream soda, a different item on the same fountain's list.
- YieldOne 12-ounce glass, served immediately. It does not hold, the foam falls within a minute or two.
American soda fountains ran on standardised syrup-and-carbonated-water formulas, and books like this were trade manuals for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than for home cooks. The distinction between coarse and fine streams mattered in practice, the fine stream serving for foaming and mixing and the coarse for volume. Chocolate was among the most reliably popular fountain flavours from the late nineteenth century onward, partly because a well-made cocoa syrup kept without refrigeration. "Frosted" drinks, built on shaved ice in a pre-chilled glass, were a summer specialty; the term later drifted, and in parts of New England a frosted came to mean a milkshake, which is not what is being made here.