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Fruit Pudding
One-half ounce crushed strawberries, ½ ounce crushed peaches, ice cream to fill small glass. Serve with spoon.
A fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish: two spoonfuls of fruit crush over ice cream in a small glass. The proportions look tiny because they are, and because "crushed fruit" at a soda fountain was a specific product, not fresh berries.
- Crushed fruit was a sweetened preparationFountain crushes were generally fruit mashed with sugar and held ready in covered jars, thick and syrupy rather than fresh and watery. Plain mashed strawberries will taste thin and bleed into the ice cream; macerate them with sugar for at least half an hour first.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesOunces here are most likely fluid ounces -- fountain work was generally measured by volume. On that reading half an ounce is one tablespoon, so the whole dish carries about two tablespoons of fruit total.
- What a "small glass" holdsProbably something in the region of 5 to 6 ounces. A modern 6 oz sundae dish or wine glass is a reasonable target; a large bowl throws the fruit-to-ice-cream ratio off entirely.
- PeachesPeach crush would have been made from ripe peaches, skinned and mashed with sugar, with canned fruit standing in out of season. Drain canned fruit well before crushing or the syrup will pool at the bottom of the glass.
- Serve at onceSugared fruit crush is warmer than the ice cream and starts melting it on contact. Build it as it is wanted rather than in advance.
- YieldOne serving.
By the time books like this were printed, the American drugstore fountain had a standing repertoire of "crushed fruits" — strawberry, peach, pineapple, cherry — ladled over ice cream, into sodas, or onto sliced bananas. The sundae, generally traced to the 1880s and 1890s and often said to have begun as a way of selling ice cream and syrup on Sundays when carbonated drinks were frowned upon, gave fountain men a whole catalogue of these small combinations, each with a name to letter on the wall card. The name "Fruit Pudding" may well have been chosen with an eye to the customer: there is no pudding in it, but the name arguably promised something more substantial than two spoonfuls of fruit on a scoop of vanilla.