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Goodner's Cereal Cream
Fill mixing glass ⅔ full with soft ice cream, add quantity desired of Malta Vita or Egg-O'-See, and mix with bar spoon. Transfer into sundae and mix with bar spoon. Transfer into sundae glass or large sherbet cup and serve.
A fountain man's improvisation: soft ice cream stirred with breakfast cereal flakes and served in a sherbet cup. The whole thing lives or dies on speed, since the flakes begin softening the moment they meet the cream.
- Mixing glassThe tall, heavy-bottomed glass a fountain used for shaking and stirring; these ran to 12 or 16 oz. Two-thirds of a 16 oz glass is a bit over a cup of ice cream, enough for one generous serving or two modest ones.
- "Soft ice cream"Not soft-serve, which did not exist commercially yet. This means hardened ice cream left to temper until it will take a spoon easily.
- Malta Vita and Egg-O'-SeeBoth were early flaked wheat breakfast cereals, toasted, and both are long gone. Plain wheat or corn flakes stand in closest; granola is too heavy and will not fold in.
- "Quantity desired"The original leaves this open. A half cup of flakes to a good cup of ice cream gives texture without turning the mixture stiff and dry.
- The hingeMix and serve quickly; overworking it melts the cream and the flakes go limp. The mixing instruction appears twice, but the surrounding line is garbled and the repetition looks like a printing duplication.
- ServingA sundae glass or large sherbet cup, as written; a coupe or a wide-mouthed 8 oz glass works. Serve with a long spoon and no sauce, which would defeat the point.
This belongs to a brief moment when the American breakfast-cereal industry was new, aggressively advertised, and looking for every possible outlet. Malta-Vita, made in Battle Creek, Michigan, and Egg-O-See, from Quincy, Illinois, were among dozens of flaked-wheat brands that followed in the wake of the Kellogg and Post successes around the turn of the century, and both were marketed as health foods as much as food. Soda fountains of the period ran on the same logic ⅲ the drugstore fountain sold phosphates and malted milk as tonics ⅲ so folding a cereal that the malted brands themselves advertised as "predigested" into ice cream sat comfortably in that vocabulary. Recipes attached to a proprietor's name, as this one is to Goodner, seem to have circulated readily in the fountain trade: a house specialty passed through trade manuals so other operators could offer it too. Nearly all the brands named in books like this one were consolidated or discontinued within a generation.