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Peach Milk Shake
One ounce peach syrup, ½ ounce grape juice, ½ ounce pineapple syrup, ½ glass shaved ice. Fill the glass with milk, shake well and serve with two straws.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: three sweet syrups, milk, and a shaker. Read the ounces as fluid ounces and the glass as the standard 12-ounce soda tumbler of the period.
- The glass sets the proportionsFountain glasses of the period ran somewhere around 8 to 12 fl oz, and the recipe does not say which. On a 12 oz glass, half a glass of shaved ice is about 6 oz by volume, which with the 2 oz of syrup and juice would leave roughly 4 oz of milk.
- Peach and pineapple syrupFountain syrups of the period could be made from crushed fruit cooked with sugar and strained, though sugar syrups flavoured with fruit essences and acid were also sold. A good fruit syrup or lightly thinned peach preserve gets nearer the first sort than a commercial pump syrup.
- Grape juiceThe bottled unfermented grape juice sold to American fountains was typically Concord, dark and acidic. Here it reads as colour and acidity against the two sweet syrups, in a small quantity.
- Acid and milkGrape juice is acidic enough to risk curdling milk if the two stand together. Shake as soon as the milk goes in and serve at once; the shaved ice keeps everything cold, which helps.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved ice dissolves quickly in the shaker, chilling and thinning at once. Crushed ice is the practical substitute for a modern shaker.
- No ice creamDespite the name there is none, and none is implied. Adding a scoop turns this into a different drink and buries the grape entirely.
- YieldOne tall glass, served with two straws as the recipe directs.
"Milk shake" in American soda-fountain usage is often said to have meant just that: milk shaken with flavouring and ice, frequently with no ice cream at all — though the earliest recorded American uses, in the 1880s, describe a spirituous eggnog-type drink, and the wholesome syrup-and-milk sense settled in only later. Fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries list dozens of these, built from a house stock of fruit syrups kept in pumps along the marble counter, with the dispenser's skill lying in balancing two or three of them by the half-ounce. The dash of Concord grape here is doing the work a squeeze of lemon might do elsewhere, cutting the sugar and tinting the milk; Welch pasteurised unfermented grape juice from 1869, and it was much promoted as a temperance and communion drink, making its way onto fountain counters over the following decades. The ice-cream milkshake as most people now picture it belongs to the later era of the electric drink mixer, which is generally credited with displacing formulas like this one.