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Pine Cherry Sundae
Fill sundae cup ⅔ full pineapple ice, then fill up with pineapple crushed fruit. Top off with sliced pineapple and orange and chopped brandied cherries. Keep one eye on your customers, syrups, attendants, location, the weather, etc. Keep the other eye on your fountain.
A fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish: three forms of pineapple stacked in one glass, finished with fruit and cherries. Everything depends on having the components ready and cold.
- "Pineapple ice"A water ice, not ice cream — pineapple juice or puree, sugar syrup and water, churned or still-frozen. A good commercial pineapple sorbet stands in exactly; sherbet with dairy in it makes the glass heavier than intended.
- "Crushed fruit"Fountain trade term for a thick, sweetened crushed-fruit topping held in a jar at the counter, roughly the consistency of a loose preserve. Crushed canned pineapple drained of most of its syrup and stirred with a spoonful of simple syrup gives the same thing.
- Sundae cupThe recipe does not specify a size; period fountain glasses of the tulip or footed type were generally in the region of 6 to 8 fl oz, which would make two-thirds ice roughly 4 to 5 oz. One serving.
- Brandied cherriesCherries steeped in brandy and syrup, dark and firm, not the bright bleached maraschinos. Jarred brandied or amarena cherries are the closest current equivalent; chop them so they distribute rather than sitting as a garnish.
- The sliced pineappleCanned rings, drained and cut into wedges, would have been the convenient counter option. Fresh pineapple works but is sharper and will thin the crushed fruit if it sits.
- Assemble to orderPineapple ice softens fast against room-temperature crushed fruit. Chill the glass, build it in one pass and send it out — a sundae left standing collapses into pineapple soup.
- The closing lineNot part of the method. It is counter advice to the soda man, and a fair indication of how these manuals were written: procedure and shop discipline in the same breath.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were trade books, sold to druggists and fountain proprietors who needed a repertoire of named dishes that could be built in seconds from a standing stock of ices, crushed fruits and syrups. Pineapple in all three forms here — ice, crush, sliced — reflects how far canned Hawaiian pineapple had entered the American counter trade by the early twentieth century, when it was cheap, shelf-stable and reliably sweet in a way fresh tropical fruit was not. Fruit put up in spirits was a standard fountain garnish, and the brandied cherries here sit oddly alongside the fountain's reputation as a temperance institution. The chatty final sentence is typical of the genre, which mixed formulas with shop-floor coaching.