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Frozen Strawberries
Made on the same lines as frozen peaches with more precaution as to the berries. Another method is to have the strawberries soaked over night in syrup, then drained off and mixed with strawberry cream.
This is fountain shorthand rather than a full recipe: it assumes you have the frozen peach formula in front of you and know what a dispenser meant by syrup and fruit cream. Here is what the gaps stand for.
- What "frozen" means hereProbably not fruit frozen solid on a tray but fruit combined with a sweetened cream base and frozen to a soft, scoopable set; the reference to "strawberry cream" points that way, though the recipe itself specifies no equipment. A fountain freezer of the period would have been a hand-crank canister packed in ice and rock salt; any modern ice-cream machine does the same work.
- The precaution about the berriesThe recipe does not say what the precaution is. The second method's soak-and-drain suggests the concern is excess free juice in the fruit, which freezes into icy shards through the cream.
- Overnight in syrupFountain syrup meant a heavy sugar syrup rather than a thin pourable one, though this recipe gives no formula for it. A long soak draws water out of the berries and replaces it with sugar, which both firms the fruit and lowers its freezing point so it stays tender rather than turning to gravel.
- Don't waste the drained syrupThe drained syrup -- After soaking it carries the fruit's own juice. The recipe does not say what becomes of it; it would serve in the cream base or as a sauce.
- Strawberry creamThe recipe does not define the term. It means some strawberry-flavoured cream preparation; period usage of "cream" can cover either a sweetened flavoured cream or an ice cream.
- Texture and timingAdd the drained berries in the last minute or two of churning, or fold them in by hand afterward. Churned from the start they break down and streak the cream.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe gives neither. Serve straight from the freezer, as this style softens fast.
Soda fountain manuals of the early twentieth century were trade books, written dispenser to dispenser, and they read like it: cross-references instead of full formulas, and an assumption that the reader already owned an ice machine, a syrup rail and a stock of fruit in heavy syrup. Frozen fruits had their place on a fountain menu, and strawberries posed a particular problem, since the American strawberry season was short and the berries would not hold their shape through freezing without the sugar treatment described here. The overnight maceration draws on preserving practice older than the fountain by centuries, used in preserving kitchens long before it was pressed into service behind a marble counter.