Home › At the Fountain › Peach Cobbler
Peach Cobbler
Peach Syrup, 2 ounces; Whipped Cream, ½ ounce; Plain Cream, 1; American Sliced Peach, 66; Shaved Ice, ¼ tumblerful. Draw peach syrup and plain cream in shaker with ice, shake well, fill with fine stream soda, add the sliced peach and the whipped cream on top.
A shaken fountain drink built on the pattern of a bar cobbler, using nothing stronger than soda water. The measurements are fluid ounces and the stray numbers are the book's own cross-references.
- "American Sliced Peach, 66""American Sliced Peach, 66" is not sixty-six peaches. The number is almost certainly a cross-reference to a numbered formula elsewhere in the book, presumably some form of sliced peach in syrup; in practice, use a generous tablespoon or two of peaches in syrup. "Plain Cream, 1" appears, on the pattern of the other quantities, to mean one ounce.
- Fluid ounces, not weightTwo ounces of peach syrup is a quarter cup, one ounce of cream is two tablespoons, and half an ounce of whipped cream is a spoonful of topping. A fountain tumbler ran about 8 to 10 ounces, so a quarter tumblerful of shaved ice is roughly 2 to 2½ ounces by volume, a quarter to a third of a cup.
- "Fine stream" sodaFountains had coarse and fine draw valves. Fine stream means a thin, hard jet of carbonated water aimed to mix without foaming the drink over. At home, pour chilled seltzer down the inside of the tilted glass, slowly.
- Order mattersShake syrup, cream and ice first and only then charge with soda. Adding carbonated water to a shaker with cream in it produces a foam volcano and a flat drink.
- Shaved iceShaved, not cubed. The fine ice chills fast and dilutes slightly on contact, which is part of the texture. Cubes dilute far less in the time of a short shake, leaving the drink thicker and duller.
- The creamFountain "plain cream" was usually light or table cream, around 18 to 20 percent fat. Half-and-half is the nearest supermarket equivalent; heavy cream makes the drink heavy against the soda.
- YieldOne tall glass, about 10 ounces. Serve with a spoon as well as a straw, since the peaches sink and the whipped cream sits on top.
The name comes from the bar, not the bakery. A cobbler in nineteenth-century drink books was a glass of wine or spirits shaken with sugar and ice and crowned with fruit, the sherry cobbler being the famous example, and it was among the first drinks Americans habitually took through a straw. Soda fountains, which flourished partly as respectable alternatives to saloons, borrowed the vocabulary wholesale: cobblers, fizzes, frappes and sours all reappear on fountain lists with syrup standing in for liquor. That borrowing is what a book like this documents, and it may be that the dispenser was presumed to have his own preserved fruits numbered and ready on the counter, which would explain why the peach here reads as a cross-reference rather than an ingredient.</p>