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Grape Ambrosia
Use whites of 18 eggs, beat to a froth and add sugar, 5 pounds; mix both well, then add 1 gallon sweet milk, 2 gallons distilled water, 2 quarts Ameri-milk, 2 gallons distilled water, 2 quarts American Grape Juice, 2 pints grated pineapple, 2 ounces fruit acid, ¼ ounce essence lemon. Mix all well in a freezer; let it stand, after being well packed, for an hour or so to become harder. Serve same as ice cream.
A soda-fountain frozen dessert built in bulk — better than five gallons of it — and the whole structure rests on eighteen raw egg whites that are never heated at any point. That is the reason this one belongs on the page as a document rather than as a plan for the afternoon.
- Raw egg whites, never cookedThe whites go in beaten to a froth, the mix goes straight into the freezer, and nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not pasteurise; it preserves. Eighteen whites across a batch this size means one contaminated egg contaminates several gallons of a dessert intended to be scooped for many people over a day or more.
- Acid is not a safeguardThe two ounces of fruit acid and the grape juice will lower the pH. Acidity at this dilution does not reliably inactivate pathogens in a cold, protein-rich, sugar-buffered mix. If you want something in this family, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard or pasteurised whites.
- The text is garbledThe verbatim line runs "2 quarts Ameri-milk, 2 gallons distilled water, 2 quarts American Grape Juice" — the water is repeated and "Ameri-milk" is evidently a broken fragment, most likely a compositor's slip. The proportions probably intend one gallon sweet milk, two gallons distilled water, two quarts American grape juice. Worth knowing when you read the proportions, though it does not make the recipe usable.
- Fountain ingredients that have gone"Fruit acid" in the fountain trade generally meant a citric or tartaric acid solution; two ounces here is the sour note that makes the grape read as fruit rather than syrup. "Essence lemon" is lemon oil cut with alcohol, stronger than modern extract — a quarter ounce flavours the whole batch.
- ScaleA bulk batch of several gallons. This is a commercial formula written for a soda man with a hand-cranked or belt-driven freezer tub and a supply of block ice and rock salt, not a household quantity.
Soda-fountain books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries doubled as manuals for the whole cold-dish trade, and "ambrosia" appears as a fountain name for a fruited, milky frozen mix — a name also attached to the Southern dessert of oranges, sugar and grated coconut, and behind that to the food of the Greek gods, though used loosely enough that it mostly signalled richness and fruit. Beaten egg white gave a light, snowy body to a mix carrying no cream at all, which is why a recipe with a gallon of milk and two gallons of water still promises to "serve same as ice cream." The "American Grape Juice" and the bulk fruit acid both point to the period's supply chain, when unfermented grape juice had become a respectable commercial article.