Home › At the Fountain › Frosted Fruit
Frosted Fruit
Shaven ice, ½ tumblerful; ice cream, 1 tablespoonful, pure milk, 1 ounce; extract of vanilla, 1 dash; crushed strawberry, 1 teaspoonful; crushed pineapple, 1 teaspoonful; crushed raspberry, 1 teaspoonful; Catawba syrup, 1½ ounces. Shake well, then add plain soda, 1 tumblerful. Serve with spoon. Careless clerks should not be employed at the soda fountain. Absolute neatness in dress should be insisted upon.
A fountain drink assembled in a shaker glass and finished at the tap. The proportions read oddly on paper because the original assumed a fountain's high-pressure carbonated water doing the mixing in the glass.
- TumblerSoda-fountain tumblers of this period varied, but something in the range of 8 to 12 fluid ounces is a reasonable assumption. On an 8-ounce glass, half a tumblerful of shaven ice is about 4 oz by volume, and the finishing soda is close to a full cup.
- Shaven iceShaved, not cubed or cracked -- the fine snow that came off a block under a hand shaver. A blender pulse or a snow-cone shaver gives the right texture; crushed cubes will sit in the bottom and dilute unevenly.
- Catawba syrupA sweet syrup flavoured with Catawba grapes, the native American grape behind much nineteenth-century American wine. Nothing sold today is quite the same; a good Concord grape syrup is the closest ordinary substitute.
- Plain sodaUnflavoured carbonated water, drawn hard from the fountain. Bottled seltzer or club soda works, but pour it down the side of the glass in one go to keep the head, which is the point of the drink.
- A dashA small splash from a dash bottle rather than a measured quantity. Vanilla extract is far stronger than the fountain's diluted vanilla syrup, so keep it to a few drops here.
- Order of operationsShake everything except the soda, then add the soda last and do not shake again. Shaking carbonated water flattens it and, in a closed shaker, sprays it across the room.
- Crushed fruitThese were sugar-packed fruit preserves kept in fountain crocks, sweeter and looser than fresh fruit. If using fresh berries, mash them with a little sugar and let them stand ten minutes so they give up juice.
- YieldOne tall glass, and a generous one: the finishing tumblerful of soda goes on top of the ice, syrup, milk, ice cream and fruit. Serve with a spoon, as the original says, because a good part of it is fruit and ice.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the home cook, which is why the recipe ends with instructions about the clerk's dress rather than about the drink. American drugstore fountains grew out of the pharmacist's business in carbonated mineral waters, sold first as a health tonic and then, by the 1890s, as a mass pleasure; the dispenser was expected to work fast, from crocks of crushed fruit and rows of syrup pumps, and to look clean while doing it. The Catawba grape named in the syrup was the great commercial grape of the Ohio valley and the Finger Lakes before Concord displaced it, and its appearance here is a useful marker of the period. The name "frosted" attaches to a whole family of shaken, fruited soda drinks rather than to this one recipe.