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Ladies' Favorite
Take 1 quart cream and ½ gallon plain syrup; mix; bring them to a boil; when cold, add ½ an ounce vanilla extract, ½ pint strawberry syrup; use 2 ounces of above to glass, and draw soda water with a fine stream. Lemon Aceton for Headaches, etc. 1 ounce lemon syrup. 2 drams, by measure, Caffein Aceton (Wyeth), Bromo Caffein, Bromo Seltzer, or any other. Put into glass Caffein Aceton, add to it ¼ glass from small stream, then add syrup and ice; fill solid. Add sprig of mint and slice of lemon.
Two formulas run together here: a cream-and-vanilla fountain syrup, and a medicated "headache" soda built on proprietary caffeine preparations that no longer belong in a glass. The second one is the reason for the caution above.
- The headache drink is the problem"Caffein Aceton" was a proprietary caffeine compound of the acetanilide type; acetanilide causes methemoglobinemia and was abandoned in favour of safer analgesics for that reason. Bromo-Caffeine and the original Bromo-Seltzer carried bromide salts, which accumulate in the body and were a recognised cause of chronic bromism. Neither belongs in a beverage under any dosing.
- Two drams is a real dose, not a flavouringTwo fluid drams is a quarter of a fluid ounce, dispensed by eye at a counter with no record of how many a customer had that week. Bromism in this period is associated with repeated self-dosing on proprietary bromide preparations. If you want something for a headache, use a current over-the-counter product at its labelled dose.
- "Plain syrup"Fountain plain syrup is a simple syrup, generally heavier than a 1:1 bar syrup. Half a gallon is 8 cups.
- Fountain measuresA quart of cream is 4 cups; half an ounce of vanilla extract is about a tablespoon; half a pint of strawberry syrup is 1 cup. Two ounces of finished syrup per glass is a quarter cup.
- Boiling the cream and syrupThe point is not thickening but keeping quality: scalding heats the mixture through. Cool it quickly and keep it refrigerated; a cream syrup is perishable.
- Add the vanilla coldThe extract goes in after cooling, as the original says, because alcohol-based flavouring boils off. The same applies to the strawberry syrup, whose colour dulls with heat.
- "A fine stream"Fountain apparatus offered a coarse stream for mixing and a fine stream for finishing. A fine stream is the gentler draw, which is what keeps a cream soda from foaming over the rim.
- YieldThe mixture comes to something over 3 quarts before any loss in boiling, roughly fifty glasses at two ounces each. Scale down hard unless you are running a counter.
American soda fountains grew out of the drugstore, and this page shows the seam plainly: a sweet cream soda for the carriage trade sits directly beside a dosed headache draught, both drawn by the same clerk from the same apparatus. "Ladies' Favorite" is a trade name of the type fountain manuals produced by the dozen, marking a drink as mild, creamy and pink rather than tart or medicinal, at a period when the fountain was one of the few public counters a respectable woman could use unaccompanied. The headache formula reflects the era before the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and the regulation that followed: acetanilide and bromide preparations were sold under brand names and dispensed by measure at the counter, sometimes advertised as harmless. They were not.