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Golfer's Delight
Four ounces plain cream, 1 ounce malted milk, ¾ ounce coffee syrup, 6 dashes brandy, ½ glass ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain drink, not a cocktail: cream, malt and coffee syrup shaken cold, with brandy used as a flavouring rather than a base spirit. It builds in a shaker and finishes in a tall glass.
- Ounces are fluid ouncesFour ounces of cream is half a cup; ¾ ounce of coffee syrup is a tablespoon and a half. The malted milk may have been measured by weight rather than volume; an ounce of the powder is roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons.
- Plain creamFountain "plain cream" was ordinary sweet cream, closer to today's half-and-half or light cream than to heavy whipping cream. Heavy cream will make the drink cloying and too thick to strain cleanly.
- Malted milkMalted milk powder is still sold and still works, but modern brands are sweeter and often contain more sugar than the plain fountain product. Taste before adding the full coffee syrup.
- Coffee syrupA sweetened coffee concentrate, not brewed coffee. Rhode Island-style coffee syrup is the closest surviving commercial equivalent; strong cold brew reduced with sugar will stand in.
- Six dashes brandyA dash from a fountain bottle is usually reckoned at about an eighth of a teaspoon, which would make six dashes roughly a teaspoon: a flavouring note, not a measure of liquor. Some fountain formulas of this type may have intended a non-alcoholic brandy extract, and if you use extract rather than spirit, half the quantity is plenty.
- Half a glass of iceProbably the mixing glass rather than the serving glass, since the drink is strained. The recipe gives no vessel size, so the quantity is a matter of judgement. Cracked ice chills and dilutes quickly; cubes will under-dilute in the short shake this drink gets.
- Shake, strain, toss"toss" appears to call for pouring the strained drink between vessels to aerate it, though the recipe does not define the term.
- YieldOne drink of perhaps 7 to 8 ounces after dilution; the recipe does not specify the serving glass.
Malted milk was the making of drinks like this one: a dried blend of malted barley, wheat flour and milk developed by the Horlick brothers in Racine, Wisconsin, in the early 1880s and sold first as an invalid and infant food before soda men discovered what it did to a milkshake. By the time fountain manuals of this sort were being compiled, malt was standard equipment behind the counter, and dispensers were building an enormous repertoire of named combinations, sporting names among them. "Golfer's Delight" belongs to that naming habit rather than to any documented golfing origin. The brandy is worth noting too: American fountain work made use of flavouring extracts sold under liquor names, so a "brandy" dash in a soda book may have contained no spirit at all -- a useful ambiguity in the decades when public drinking was restricted or banned outright.