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Mint Sundae
Fill saucer or glass nearly full ice cream, pour 1 to 2 ounces creme de menthe syrup over the ice cream, and add 3 or 4 creme de menthe cherries. Serve in an ice cream saucer or a delicate saucer champagne glass with small sherbet spoon and glass of water.
A fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the only real decisions are the syrup, the glass and the temperature of the ice cream.
- Crème de menthe syrup is not the liqueurAt a soda fountain this ordinarily meant a non-alcoholic green mint syrup, one of the standard bottled fountain syrups. Bar liqueur will thin and bleed into the ice cream; use a mint fountain syrup, or a snow-cone type mint syrup, if you want the original effect.
- 1 to 2 ouncesThat is 2 to 4 tablespoons, or roughly 30-60 ml. Two ounces over a single saucer of ice cream is generous by modern taste; start at one.
- Crème de menthe cherriesMaraschino-style cherries steeped in green mint syrup, once a standard fountain garnish. Green cocktail cherries are the nearest current product; ordinary red maraschinos work but lose the all-green presentation the dish was built around.
- The ice creamThe recipe does not say which flavour; plain vanilla suits the dish, with the mint as the flavour and the ice cream as the body. Take it from the freezer only when the glass and spoon are ready; a saucer of soft ice cream under thin syrup collapses into soup within a minute or two.
- Saucer champagne glassThe wide, shallow coupe, not a flute. Chill it first. A small stemmed dessert or coupe glass gives roughly the proportions the recipe assumes.
- Yield and serviceOne sundae. The recipe calls for the glass of water as part of the service, and it still cuts the sugar usefully.
Soda-fountain manuals of the early twentieth century were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the home cook, which is why this entry specifies the glassware and the small sherbet spoon as carefully as the syrup. Crème de menthe syrup arguably gave the fountain a way to sell the glamour of a fashionable after-dinner liqueur without the licence or the alcohol — an arrangement that, if so, became more valuable still as temperance sentiment grew and, later, under Prohibition, when drugstore fountains absorbed a good deal of the custom that had gone to bars. The green mint and green cherries are pure showmanship: colour was a large part of what a sundae sold.