Home › At the Fountain › Maple Frappe
Maple Frappe
Two ounces maple syrup, 3 ounces plain cream, large teaspoonful of ice cream; shake well with ice, use only fine stream and serve in bell glass. "Frappe" is simply another name for a well-shaken ice cream soda. A dispenser in a small drug store can serve a frappe as easily as an ice cream soda. Mix as for an ice cream soda and convert into a frappe by putting a common shaker over the glass and shaking it well. Serve with a straw.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen one, written for a dispenser standing at a marble counter with a carbonator at his elbow. It translates easily if you know what the fountain terms mean.
- The measures are fluid ouncesTwo ounces of maple syrup is a quarter cup; three ounces of cream is a generous third of a cup. The "large teaspoonful" of ice cream is presumably a heaped rather than a level spoon.
- "Fine stream" is the soda tapFountain draft arms had coarse and fine streams. The fine stream delivered carbonated water in a gentle spray that mixed without foaming the drink over. Use chilled seltzer poured slowly down the side of the glass, and only a few ounces "|" this is a small, rich drink, not a tall soda.
- Plain creamIn fountain parlance this meant sweet, unwhipped dairy cream, roughly what we would call light cream (about 18-20% fat). Heavy cream will make it cloying against the syrup.
- The ice cream is a thickener, not a scoopThe spoonful of vanilla ice cream gives body and a finer foam when shaken. A full scoop would make this a different, heavier drink.
- ShakingShake the syrup, cream and ice cream with ice until frothy, strain into the glass, then add the soda. The passage that follows describes the alternative method: build the soda in the glass, invert a shaker tin over it and shake the whole thing.
- Bell glassA footed, flaring fountain glass. Any tulip or small soda glass will serve.
- Maple syrupUse real maple syrup; a dark or amber grade gives the fuller flavor. Pancake syrup is corn syrup with flavoring and will taste thin here.
- YieldOne drink, about 8 ounces finished.
The soda fountain of the early twentieth century was a drugstore department with its own vocabulary, and books like this one were trade manuals teaching clerks to work it. Frappé is simply the French past participle for "iced" or "struck," borrowed into American fountain slang, and as the entry itself concedes, it amounted to a marketing distinction rather than a culinary one "|" the same soda, shaken. Maple is often said to have been a staple fountain flavor in the Northeast, where syrup was a regional commodity rather than a specialty item, and it appears throughout period dispensing books alongside vanilla, chocolate, coffee and the fruit "phosphates."