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Lynch Frappe
Strawberry syrup, ¾ ounce; pineapple syrup, ¾ ounce; sweet cream, I ounce; angostura bitters, 1 dash; add a small quantity of ice cream and shake well, put in 12-ounce glass; add a little carbonated water, small stream, and ice cream to fill up glass; garnish with pineapple and cherry.
A fountain drink built in a shaker rather than a blender, from the era when a soda clerk worked with a rack of syrups, a cold carbonated water draft and a cabinet of hand-packed ice cream. The measures are fluid ounces and the whole thing takes under a minute.
- The measures¾ ounce is 1½ tablespoons; 1 ounce is 2 tablespoons. Total syrup here is only 1½ ounces, which is modest — though fountain syrups were dense, heavily sweetened preparations, so the sugar load is higher than the volume suggests.
- Fountain syrup is not fruit juiceStrawberry and pineapple syrup meant a heavy sugar syrup, roughly two parts sugar to one part water, flavored with fruit juice or extract. Modern coffee-bar syrups are the closest equivalent; if you substitute juice you will get a thin, sour drink.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from the sour cream and buttermilk also kept in a kitchen. Light cream or half-and-half is the right weight; heavy cream will thicken too much in the shaker.
- The dash of bitters is the pointAngostura is what separates this from any other strawberry-pineapple frappé. One dash in 12 ounces reads as spice and depth rather than bitterness — do not scale it up.
- Shake, then buildOnly a small scoop of ice cream goes into the shaker, enough to thicken the cream and syrup into a frappé. The rest is added to the glass afterward, so the drink is not blended uniformly smooth like a milkshake.
- Carbonated water, small streamA thin stream drawn down the side of the glass, not a coarse blast. Hitting cream and ice cream with hard carbonation makes it foam over the rim and lose its fizz quickly.
- Glass and yieldOne 12-ounce soda glass, one serving. A modern pint glass works; a shorter tumbler will not hold the ice cream and the water together.
- GarnishPineapple and a cherry; the recipe does not specify the cut or the type of cherry. Serve immediately.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the clerk behind the marble counter rather than for a home cook, which is why the instructions assume a draft arm, a syrup rack and an ice cream cabinet within reach. Frappé — from French frapper, to strike, and used to mean 'iced' or 'chilled' — was the fountain trade's word for a drink shaken with a little ice cream or shaved ice until it thickened, sitting somewhere between a soda and a milkshake on the menu board. The dash of Angostura bitters echoes bar practice: fountain men borrowed from the cocktail side of the trade, and bitters were one of the few genuinely bitter, aromatic notes available to balance syrups that were otherwise almost pure sugar. Drinks named for people, as this one appears to be, were common in fountain books; they were often house creations picked up from a particular clerk or shop and passed into print with the name attached, though the specific Lynch behind this one is not recorded here.