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Pineapple Glace
Two spoonfuls crushed pineapple, ½ ounce pineapple syrup, shaved ice. Serve in punch glasses.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: three components, no cooking, and a great deal left to the dispenser's judgment. The proportions below are what the original assumes rather than states.
- "Spoonfuls" is the fountain spoon"Spoonfuls" is probably the fountain spoon -- soda dispensers worked with a long-handled fountain spoon, and its capacity seems to have been in the region of a tablespoon, so two spoonfuls likely means something near 1 oz of crushed pineapple rather than two heaped dinner spoons. The original does not say.
- Half an ounce of syrupThat is one tablespoon. Fountain syrups of the period were generally made to a heavy simple-syrup density, so a modern thin syrup may taste weak by comparison.
- Shaved, not cubedThe recipe calls for shaved ice, which packs into the glass and takes up the syrup. Cubes leave voids and the drink tends to separate into sweet syrup at the bottom and water at the top.
- Punch glass sizeFountain punch glasses were small stemmed glasses, commonly somewhere in the 4 to 6 oz range. The recipe gives no order of assembly; filling with shaved ice, then the fruit, then the syrup is a reasonable reading.
- PineappleCrushed pineapple sold commercially was generally canned in syrup, and that sweetness would be part of the balance if that is what was meant here. With fresh crushed fruit you may want slightly more syrup.
- Serve at onceThere is nothing to hold this together but cold. Built more than a minute or two ahead it slumps into pineapple water.
- YieldThe quantities suggest a single glass, though the original says "punch glasses" in the plural. Fruit and syrup can be measured out in advance; the ice cannot.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the cook at home, which is why the instructions read as ratios instead of methods. A "glace" at the fountain was not the frozen ice of French confectionery but simply a drink built on shaved ice with fruit and syrup, one of a family that also included frappes, phosphates and juleps; the borrowed French word, one suspects, did the work of making a cheap drink sound worth ordering. Canned crushed pineapple became central to the trade in the decade or so after 1901, when Hawaiian canneries had made a fruit that was still a luxury in the 1870s into something a druggist could keep open in a tin under the counter. That the recipe specifies punch glasses is a small clue to its place on the menu: it belonged with the fancier stemmed service rather than the plain soda tumbler.