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Rich Chocolate Frappe
One ounce chocolate paste, ½ ounce grated cocoanut, white 1 egg. Frappe these ingredients thoroughly with a spoon, add hot water and top off with a spoonful of ice cream. The water must be boiling hot.
A fountain drink from the era when the soda clerk kept a bowl of shelled eggs beside the syrup pumps. The archaic terms are easy enough to translate, but the egg is the problem, and it is not a small one.
- Why it fails: the raw egg whiteOne ounce of chocolate paste plus half an ounce of coconut is a cold, thick mass; boiling water poured over it drops well below any pasteurizing temperature almost immediately, and the ice cream on top cools it further. Salmonella in shell eggs is a documented risk in whites as well as yolks, and this drink never brings the egg anywhere near 160F. Nothing in the method fixes that, which is why the recipe should be read rather than made. If you want a chocolate frappe, use a current recipe.
- "Frappe" here is a verbThe recipe uses frappe as an instruction: beat or whip the ingredients thoroughly with a spoon until foamy, rather than referring to the semi-frozen dessert also called a frappe. Much of the drink's body comes from that whipped egg white.
- Chocolate pasteFountain chocolate paste was generally a thick cocoa-and-sugar mixture cooked with a little water and held ready at the counter. It is not the same as chocolate syrup, and not the same as melted baking chocolate.
- CocoanutThe older spelling of coconut. Grated coconut of this period was usually freshly grated from the nut or sold moist-shredded; it was less sweet than most bagged sweetened flake sold now.
- Ounces are weight, not volumeOunces -- The paste and coconut are given in ounces; if read as weight, an ounce of paste is roughly two tablespoons, though density varied by house recipe.
- YieldApparently a single glass; the recipe gives no volume.
The American Soda Book belongs to a large family of trade manuals published for druggists and soda clerks, whose fountains were an arm of the pharmacy and whose drinks were sold as much for restoration as for pleasure. Egg drinks were a fixture of that counter: the egg phosphate, the egg lemonade and the egg chocolate leaned on a raw white or whole egg for froth, body and the period's idea of nourishment. A hot chocolate drink topped with ice cream sits between the winter and summer halves of the fountain trade. Such drinks persisted into the twentieth century and faded as public health attention turned to shell eggs.