Home › At the Fountain › New York Beauty
New York Beauty
Strawberry Syrup, 1 ounce; Plain Syrup, 1 ounce; Ice Cream, ½ tablespoonfuls. Soda water fine stream.
A fountain formula written for someone standing at a marble counter with a syrup rack and a two-stream draft arm, so it assumes far more than it says. The whole drink is built in one glass and served at once.
- The ounces are fluid ouncesOne ounce of syrup is 2 tablespoons, so this is 2 tablespoons strawberry syrup and 2 tablespoons plain syrup, a quarter cup of syrup in all. The recipe does not say what size glass is meant.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" is unflavored sugar syrup, generally made heavier than a thin bar syrup, though the proportions varied from house to house. It is there to add body and sweetness without color.
- The ice cream measure is garbledThe ice cream measure is odd -- "½ tablespoonfuls" mixes a fraction with a plural and may be a printer's slip. Take it as somewhere around a half to a full spoonful of plain vanilla and adjust to taste rather than trusting the figure as printed.
- Fine stream versus coarseA fountain arm gave a coarse stream for filling and a fine, high-pressure stream for mixing and raising foam. With a modern siphon or bottled soda, pour hard onto the syrup first to combine, then top gently so the head survives.
- Order of buildingThe recipe gives no order. General fountain practice was syrups first, a short draw of soda to mix, then the ice cream, then the rest of the soda; dropping ice cream into a full glass makes it overflow.
- Strawberry syrupFountain syrups of the period were often made from crushed fruit cooked with sugar and strained, closer to a thin preserve, though commercial and coloured syrups were also in use. Taste whatever syrup you use and cut the plain syrup back if it is very sweet.
- Yield and servingOne glass, served immediately with a straw and a long spoon.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran to hundreds of named formulas, most of them small permutations of two or three syrups, a spoon of ice cream and a stream of carbonated water. Names like "New York Beauty" were trade dressing, a way of making a familiar combination of syrups sound like something more than strawberry and vanilla. The fountain itself came out of the American drugstore, where carbonated water was first sold as a health article and the flavored syrups followed as a way to make the mineral water palatable, so the vocabulary of the trade — draughts, streams, plain syrup — stayed closer to the dispensing counter than to the kitchen. Books of this kind were sold to soda clerks as reference, which is why the instructions assume equipment and technique and record only the proportions.