Home › At the Fountain › Hot Strawberry Sundae
Hot Strawberry Sundae
Over a service of vanilla ice cream pour a ladle of hot crushed strawberry. Do not let the strawberry reach a boiling degree as it destroys the flavor.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: the whole thing lives or dies on the temperature of the fruit. Two lines of instruction, one of which is the hinge.
- Do not boil the fruitThe warning is the recipe. Held below a simmer, crushed strawberries stay bright and taste of raw fruit; carried to a boil they turn jammy and flat, and the colour dulls toward brick. Warm the crush gently over low heat or in a bain-marie, well short of a simmer.
- "Crushed strawberry"In fountain usage this generally means a sweetened fruit crush rather than a strained syrup: berries mashed with sugar and left to macerate until the sugar dissolves and the juice runs. Proportions varied from house to house, and some formulas carried far more sugar than others. Frozen sliced strawberries in syrup, warmed gently, are the closest shortcut.
- A ladleFountain fruit ladles were small dippers, on the order of an ounce or two; figure a couple of tablespoons per serving. Much more than that and the ice cream collapses before it reaches the table.
- "A service of ice cream"One service at the fountain was a single disher of ice cream, on the order of 1.5 to 2 fluid ounces (a No. 20 to a No. 16), typically served in a sundae glass.
- Keep the ice cream hardHot sauce on soft ice cream gives you strawberry soup. Hold the ice cream at 0 to 5F and chill the glass; scoop, sauce, and serve immediately.
- YieldAs written, one sundae. A pound of berries sweetened to taste makes crush enough for several servings; keep it refrigerated and use it within a few days.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one were trade literature, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the home cook, which is why the entry specifies a ladle and a service and assumes the ice cream is already on hand. The insistence that the fruit never reach a boil reflects a genuine trade concern with flavor and color, both of which were selling points in a business where the sundae sat in a clear glass at eye level.