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Pineapple Ice (One quart crushed pineapple)
One quart crushed pineapple, 3 quarts warm water, ½ sheet or 1 teaspoonful gelatin, 3 whole eggs, 1½ ounces prepared lemon, ½ ounce acid solution phosphate. Sweeten to suit taste. Japanese paper napkins cost only one-fourteenth of a cent. Occasionally they are much wanted. Keep a few on hand.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: it is scaled for a gallon of finished ice to be dipped into glasses across a working day. Several of its components are trade goods that no longer sit on a shelf, and one of them puts the whole thing out of reach.
- Raw egg, never heatedThree whole eggs go in uncooked, and nothing in the formula heats them; the only liquid specified is "warm" water. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it simply holds it. There is no step here that brings the eggs anywhere near a safe temperature. Use a current recipe if you want a pineapple ice.
- Prepared lemonMost likely a prepared lemon syrup or extract sold to the trade rather than plain juice: an ounce and a half in four quarts of mix is a flavouring dose, and substituting juice would change both the acidity and the sweetening.
- Acid solution phosphateA dilute phosphoric acid solution, the standard fountain souring agent behind the old "phosphates." It sharpened fruit flavours the way citric acid does. Food-grade versions exist but are not a grocery item.
- Half a sheet of gelatinLeaf gelatin was sold in sheets of no standard size, so "half a sheet" is not a usable measure; the alternative given, one teaspoonful of powder, is the only figure worth reading. It is there for body and to keep the ice from going grainy, not to set anything.
- Pineapple and gelatinFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and prevents it from setting. Canned crushed pineapple, heat-treated in processing, has no active enzyme, and canned fruit is the likelier thing for a fountain to have had on hand.
- The napkin lineThe sentence about Japanese paper napkins is not part of the recipe. It is stray shop advice that has been run in with the formula.
The American Soda Book belongs to a genre of trade manuals published for the men who ran drug-store fountains, a fixture of American commercial life from the 1880s through Prohibition and beyond. The formulas are written for volume and for a counter, not a household: quarts and gallons, ounces of proprietary syrups, and ingredients like acid phosphate that a household would never have bought. Phosphates were among the characteristic fountain drinks of the era, and canned crushed pineapple was becoming widely available as commercial canneries expanded. The eggs appear to be there to give a thin fruit ice enough body to hold on a spoon; the egg phosphate was a related item at the same counters. The interleaved note about napkin prices is a reminder that these books were as much about running a shop profitably as about making anything taste good.