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Frosted Coffee (Serve in or ounce glass Use)
Serve in 10 or 12-ounce glass. Use shaker half full cracked ice. Add 2 ounces American Coffee Syrup, 2 ounces plain cream, 1 tablespoonful ice cream, shake, fill shaker with carbonated water, strain; serve with straws.
A fountain drink built in a hand shaker rather than a blender, which is why the ice cream is measured in a spoonful and not a scoop. The whole point is a cold, foamy, lightly carbonated coffee drink, not a milkshake.
- The hinge: shake before you carbonateIce, syrup, cream and ice cream go in first and get shaken together; the carbonated water is added afterward and the mix is strained straight into the glass. Shaking after carbonating drives off the gas and you lose the frost.
- Coffee syrup"American Coffee Syrup" is a fountain coffee syrup, essentially a strong sweetened coffee extract; the capitalised name may point to a formula given elsewhere in this manual or to a commercial syrup. A modern equivalent is any coffee syrup sold for espresso drinks, or cold-brew concentrate cut roughly half and half with simple syrup.
- Plain cream"Plain cream" here means sweet, unwhipped, unsweetened cream rather than whipped; fountain cream was typically a light coffee-grade cream rather than heavy cream. Light cream is the nearest supermarket match, with half-and-half a thinner substitute; heavy cream will make the drink heavy and flat-tasting.
- MeasuresTwo ounces is a quarter cup, so the drink is a half cup of syrup and cream in a 10 to 12 ounce glass, with the rest made up by soda and melted ice. The tablespoonful of ice cream is a small amount, well under a scoop, there purely for body and foam.
- Cracked ice, not cubesThe recipe specifies cracked ice, which chills fast in a shaker; whole cubes chill more slowly and finely crushed ice will water the drink down.
- Carbonated waterUse plain seltzer or soda water from a fresh bottle or siphon, as cold as you can get it. Club soda contains added mineral salts, and mineral waters vary, so either may taste faintly saline against the coffee.
- YieldOne glass. It does not hold, and should be strained and drunk within a minute or two before the foam collapses.
Frosted coffee belongs to the era when the drugstore soda fountain, not the coffee shop, was where Americans bought a cold caffeinated drink. Trade manuals like this one were written for the dispenser behind the counter, which is why the instructions assume a shaker, a siphon of carbonated water, a syrup rail and a tub of ice cream all within arm's reach, and why ingredients appear as branded syrups rather than as things you would make from scratch. "Frosted" is often said to have been fountain shorthand for a shaken drink containing a little ice cream or cream, as distinguished from a plain "soda" (syrup and carbonated water); a "frappe" is harder to pin down, since usage differed widely from one house to the next and could cover anything from a milkshake-like drink to one built on soda or a semi-frozen base. The line between these categories varied from one manual and one region to the next, and the coffee-flavored versions were a minor branch of the same family that produced the ice cream soda.