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Hot Chocolate Sauce Over Ice Cream
This is becoming very popular at all large soda fountains. A cone of ice cream is turned into a silver sherbet cup or sundae glass, 1 to ½ ounces of hot chocolate sauce is poured over it, and served to customer with spoon. It makes a delicious combination. If you want to serve this hot chocolate sundae as an extra fancy drink, add a teaspoonful of whipped cream on top of the hot chocolate, and on top of all place a walnut meat from jar of American Walnut Bisque.
A fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish, but the details are specific to a 1910s soda counter and need translating.
- The ambiguous measure"1 to ½ ounces" is most likely a typesetting slip for 1 to 1½ ounces, that is 2 to 3 tablespoons of sauce, which suits a single scoop. As printed the range is impossible, so do not attempt half an ounce over a full portion.
- A cone of ice creamThis means ice cream shaped by a conical dipper and turned out of the mould, not a wafer cone. Any firmly packed scoop does the same job; the cone shape simply gave the sauce a surface to run down.
- Sauce temperature"Hot" here means warm enough to feel hot, not simmering; the book gives no figure. Sauce at a boil will slump the ice cream quickly and lose the firm-and-molten contrast that is the point of the dish.
- The vesselA silver sherbet cup conducts heat quickly. A heavy chilled glass or metal coupe works; a warm bowl will undo the dish while you carry it.
- American Walnut BisqueA branded jarred fountain product containing walnut meats, the name borrowing the "bisque" label used for nut-flecked ice creams; the exact pack is not described here. A lightly toasted walnut half is the modern equivalent.
- Whipped creamWhip to firm peaks so it sits on the hot sauce without slumping, and add it at the last moment.
- Yield and serviceOne scoop per glass, one sundae per customer, assembled to order. Nothing here holds; the dish exists for the ninety seconds between pouring and eating.
Hot sauce over cold ice cream was a novelty of the American drugstore fountain in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the confident tone here — "becoming very popular at all large soda fountains" — is the voice of a trade manual telling small operators what the city counters were already selling. The hot fudge sundae is generally traced to Los Angeles fountains around 1906, though the claim rests on later recollection rather than documents. What is certain is the commercial context: fountains ran on branded syrups, jarred fruits and prepared toppings like the "American Walnut Bisque" named here, and books of this kind doubled as instruction and advertisement. The upcharge logic is also plainly visible — a spoon of whipped cream and a single walnut half converted a plain sundae into an "extra fancy drink."