Home › At the Fountain › Old Broadway
Old Broadway
Equal proportions vanilla, coffee and cream, with whipped cream, served with cracked ice, soda and straws.
A fountain formula written in shorthand for someone standing behind the marble counter, who already knew the house measures and the order of operations. Read "vanilla" and "coffee" as flavouring syrups, not as extract and brewed coffee.
- What the three parts areVanilla syrup, coffee syrup and sweet cream in equal measure; the recipe gives no quantities. A fountain portion of syrup was commonly about 1 fl oz, so 1 oz of each is one reasonable reading.
- Coffee syrupStill sold in New England, where it survives as the base of coffee milk. Failing that, a strong syrup made from cold-brew concentrate and sugar behaves the same way; brewed coffee alone will thin the drink and throw the balance off.
- Cream means creamFountain cream was ordinary sweet cream, roughly the fat of today's half-and-half to light cream. Heavy cream makes the glass cloying against only 2 oz of syrup.
- SodaCharged water from a siphon, drawn hard into the syrup first to mix, then gently to build the head. Plain seltzer from a bottle works if it is cold and freshly opened; flat soda ruins the texture more than any other fault here.
- Order of buildingThe recipe gives no order. One workable sequence is syrups and cream into the glass, a short hard stream of soda to combine, then cracked ice and a slow fill; adding the ice first cuts the mixing stream and can leave the drink striped and unmixed.
- Cracked ice, not cubesIce was chipped from a block into irregular shards, which chill faster and pack around the straws. Coarsely crushed ice is the nearest equivalent; avoid fine snow, which waters the drink within a minute.
- Whipped creamLightly sweetened and soft, spooned on at the end so it floats rather than sinks. It is a topping, not part of the equal-thirds base.
- YieldOne soda glass; the recipe specifies no size. Straws are called for in the plural, as the counter served it.
Sodas at the turn of the century were named the way cocktails later would be — after streets, hotels, theatres and public figures — and a drink trading on "Old Broadway" was selling an address as much as a flavour. The combination itself is unremarkable and that is the point: vanilla, coffee and cream were three of the commonest syrups on any dispenser's rack. Coffee syrup, which reads as a curiosity now, was then a staple of the fountain and of the soda-water manufacturers' supply lists; it held on longest in Rhode Island and southern New England, where coffee milk is still made with it. The instruction assumes a siphon, a block of ice and a hand already trained in the order of the pour.