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Maple Crusta
One ounce maple syrup, ½ ounce vanilla syrup, ½ glass shaved ice. Rub the rim of a tall frappe glass with a piece of orange and dip the rim of the glass into powdered sugar, which will adhere to it. Shake the syrup and ice, using a heavy glass and a shaker, and pour carefully into the frappe glass so as not to wash off the crusting. Fill to about half an inch from the top with plain soda. Add slice of orange. Serve with napkin and straws.
A fountain drink built for a soda dispenser, but it translates directly to a home kitchen with a seltzer bottle and a Boston shaker. The whole point of the drink is the sugar rim, so everything after the shaking is about not destroying it.
- The hinge: pour down the inside wallThe crusting is nothing but powdered sugar stuck to a wet rim, and a splashing pour will strip it in a second. Tilt the glass, pour the shaken ice and syrup slowly against the inside wall well below the rim, then top with soda the same way.
- Ounces and glass sizeThe ounces are fluid ounces, dispensed at a fountain from syrup pumps. A period tall frappe glass runs roughly 10 to 12 oz, so "half a glass of shaved ice" is about 5 oz by volume — enough to fill it halfway loosely packed.
- Powdered sugarFountain "powdered sugar" of the era means finely ground sugar, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and goes pasty on a damp rim. Superfine gives a crisper crust.
- Vanilla syrupA standard fountain stock syrup: sugar and water, typically on the heavy side (often around two parts sugar to one of water), flavored with vanilla extract. Commercial coffee-shop vanilla syrup works, though modern versions tend to be thinner and sweeter-tasting than the old fountain stock.
- Maple syrupUse a real amber or dark syrup rather than pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavoring and will taste flat against the soda. Dark syrup stands up better to the carbonation.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved or finely crushed ice is what makes this a frappe — it chills and dilutes fast and gives the drink body. Cubes shaken in a glass shaker risk chipping the glass and can leave the drink watery on top.
- "Plain soda"Unflavored carbonated water, and the fizzier the better; fountain soda was generally reckoned more highly charged than bottled seltzer. Open a fresh bottle and keep it cold so the bubbles survive the pour.
- YieldOne tall glass, about 10 to 12 oz. Doubling is a poor idea, as the crust has to be built glass by glass.
The crusta is a bar form rather than a soda-fountain one, generally traced to Joseph Santini of New Orleans in the 1850s and recorded in Jerry Thomas's 1862 Bar-Tender's Guide, where a sugared rim and a long spiral of citrus peel dress a spirit-based drink. Soda dispensers borrowed the shape wholesale in the temperance-minded decades around 1900, when the fountain positioned itself as the respectable alternative to the saloon and cheerfully appropriated the saloon's vocabulary — frappes, fizzes, sours, crustas — with syrup standing in for liquor. Maple syrup was a natural fountain flavor in the American Northeast, cheap, distinctly domestic, and one of the few sweeteners with enough character to read through carbonation. What survives here is the theater: an orange-rubbed rim, sugar frost, a slice of fruit, napkin and straws, all of it labor performed in front of the customer at the counter.