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Milk Shake
The Latest Formula.
Fill the tumbler half full of shaved ice, add 1½ ounces milk shake syrup (composed of equal parts of vanilla and pineapple syrups), fill tumbler almost full of milk, put in lightning shaker, and shake well.
A pint of port wine added to a gallon of the milk shake syrup improves the drink. Milk shake can also be served with any flavored syrup desired.
A fountain milk shake of this vintage contains no ice cream at all: it is milk, flavoring syrup and shaved ice, shaken until foamy. Expect something closer to a thin, frothy flavored milk than to anything sold under the name today.
- The tumblerA fountain tumbler of the period likely held somewhere around 10 to 12 ounces. Half full of shaved ice plus 1½ ounces of syrup leaves perhaps 5 to 7 ounces of milk, depending on how tightly the ice packs, giving one drink.
- 1½ ounces of syrupThat is 3 tablespoons. Fountain syrups were heavier and more sugar-dense than ordinary simple syrup, plus flavoring extract, so bottled coffee or cocktail syrups are the nearest modern equivalent. Ordinary thin simple syrup will taste weak at this dose.
- Vanilla and pineappleEqual parts of the two is what this formula means by "milk shake syrup"; how general that combination was is not established here. Pineapple syrup of the period could be a sweetened juice-and-sugar syrup rather than the neon-yellow candy flavoring; canned pineapple juice cooked down with sugar comes close.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved or finely cracked ice chills the drink fast and helps it foam in a few seconds of shaking. Cubes chill and dilute more slowly, so the result is less cold. A blender pulse is not the same texture -- the point is aeration, not slush.
- The lightning shakerA proprietary metal fountain shaker of the period. Any cocktail shaker works; shake hard for 10 to 15 seconds, no longer, or the ice melts and the milk goes watery.
- StrainingThe original serves ice and all. If you would rather not drink the ice, shake and strain into a chilled glass, which is closer to how the drink reads today.
- The portA pint of port to a gallon of syrup is about one part in nine of the finished syrup, so a 1½-ounce dose carries roughly a teaspoon of port. It is a background note, not a fortified cocktail, and the recipe adds it to the bulk syrup rather than to the glass.
Before the malted-milk and hard-ice-cream shake took over in the 1920s, "milk shake" at an American soda fountain commonly meant something like this: cold milk, flavoring syrup and ice worked to a froth in a hand shaker, sold as a light refreshment and often as something faintly restorative — milk drinks sat close to the medicinal end of the fountain's repertoire, alongside egg phosphates and beef tea. The mechanical shaker made the drink practical; the electric drink mixer, arriving in fountains in the first decades of the twentieth century, is what eventually made ice cream easy to incorporate and changed the meaning of the word. The casual pint of port folded into a gallon of syrup is a reminder that a soda fountain of this era was typically attached to a drugstore, with its own stock of wines and cordials, used in trace amounts to round out flavor rather than to fortify the customer.