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Italian Sundae
Serve in regular sundae cup, part strawberry and part chocolate ice cream. Pour over ice cream a chop suey mixture. Top off with whipped cream and a few fresh strawberries.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: it assumes a dispenser with a row of prepared toppings at hand. The only term that will stop a modern reader is the topping itself.
- "Chop suey mixture"Nothing to do with the Chinese-American dish. At the soda fountain it meant a syrup-bound mixture of chopped dried and candied fruit with nuts; the combinations varied, but dates, figs, raisins and walnuts or almonds in a heavy sugar syrup or maple syrup are typical. Make it by simmering equal parts sugar and water to a light syrup, cooling it, and stirring in the chopped fruit and nuts; keep it refrigerated.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none, as a dispenser worked by the scoop and ladle. Reckon on two small scoops of ice cream, about 2 tablespoons of the fruit-and-nut syrup, and a spoonful of whipped cream per cup.
- The regular sundae cupTypically a small footed glass, on the order of 5 to 6 fluid ounces -- smaller than a modern dessert bowl. The proportions only read as generous in a vessel that size.
- Part strawberry, part chocolateSet the two scoops side by side rather than swirling them, so the halves stay distinct under the topping. Soften the ice cream only slightly; a hard scoop holds the division.
- Syrup temperaturePour the topping cold or barely cool. Warm syrup on strawberry ice cream turns the cup to soup before it reaches the table.
- Fresh strawberriesHull and halve them, and do not sugar them in advance — macerated berries weep juice that streaks the whipped cream. The berries here are garnish and texture against the soft fruit in the syrup.
- YieldOne sundae.
"Chop suey" as a sundae topping belongs to the first decades of the twentieth century, when American fountains borrowed the name for any chopped, mixed, syrup-bound garnish. Chop suey itself had become a mainstream American restaurant dish by the 1890s, familiar enough that the phrase was understood as shorthand for a chopped miscellany rather than a specific cuisine. Fountain manuals of this kind existed to give the dispenser a stock of named combinations from a fixed larder of syrups, fruits, nuts and three or four ice creams.