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Heavenly Twins
Very Good.
Take a ladleful ice cream; 1 ladleful pineapple snow. Top with whole strawberries or cherries. Serve in a sundae glass with a spoon.
A two-component fountain sundae that depends entirely on the pineapple snow, which the book assumes you already have made and standing in the fountain crock. Everything else is assembly.
- Pineapple snowA fountain "snow" is generally fruit pulp — here crushed pineapple with its syrup — beaten into stiff egg white, sometimes with a little gelatine to hold it. It is a foam rather than a sauce, and being a foam it will not hold indefinitely.
- Raw egg whiteIf you build the snow the traditional way it is uncooked. Use pasteurized whites, or substitute a stabilized whipped cream or marshmallow cream.
- LadlefulGenuinely ambiguous; no capacity is given. Read it as one generous scoop of ice cream matched by an equal volume of snow — the recipe says a ladleful of each, so the point is that the two are the same size.
- Which ice creamUnspecified. Vanilla is the obvious default and would give a white-on-white pairing, but the book does not say.
- Canned pineappleFountain pineapple was commonly canned and syruped, and canned pulp is what this formula most likely assumes. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will thin an egg-white foam and prevent gelatine from setting; if you use fresh, scald the pulp first and cool it before folding.
- Glass and yieldA sundae glass; no size or shape is specified. One serving, and it is best built to order and served at once, since a foam of this kind will not stand long against cold ice cream.
Soda fountain dispensers named drinks the way vaudeville named acts — off whatever was current and recognizable — and the phrase "heavenly twins," long in use for Castor and Pollux, was given fresh currency by Sarah Grand's 1893 novel of that title, a bestseller whose name passed quickly into everyday speech for any matched pair. By the time fountain manuals were printing the recipe, the reference had outlived the book, and the dish simply meant two equal mounds of contrasting white sitting side by side under identical fruit. Formulas like this one fill many pages of American fountain books: not cookery so much as an inventory of combinations a dispenser could produce quickly from crocks already on the counter, with the invention residing in the naming rather than the making.