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Root Beer Cream
Try This.
Fill 12-ounce glass within 1 inch of the top with solid root beer drawn from fountain. Then float on top with spoon about 2 ounces of sweet cream. Do not allow customer to use straw, and you have won his patronage on root beer.
A two-ingredient fountain drink whose whole effect depends on the cream staying where you put it. Assemble it in the glass and serve it at once.
- "Solid" root beerAt a fountain the carbonated water could be drawn as a fine (heavily aerated) stream or as a coarse "solid" stream; "solid" here most likely means the coarse draw, so the head stays low and the cream has a calm surface to sit on. Bottled root beer poured gently down the side of the glass does much the same job.
- Sweet cream"sweet" means unsoured, not sugared: plain heavy or whipping cream, unwhipped. Two ounces is a quarter cup. Thinner dairy such as half-and-half or milk is less likely to hold together on the surface.
- Floating itHold a spoon bowl-down just above the surface and pour the cream over the back of it so it spreads rather than plunges.
- Why no strawThe instruction is the point of the drink. Drinking from the rim pulls the cream through first, so each mouthful is cream followed by root beer; a straw draws from the bottom and bypasses it entirely.
- GlasswareA 12-ounce glass filled to an inch below the rim leaves room for the cream without overflow. In a smaller tumbler, scale the cream down rather than filling to the top.
- Yield and timingOne drink. The cream soon marbles down into the soda, and the acid and carbonation may flock it slightly at the boundary, so it is best served at once rather than held.
Fountain manuals of this kind were trade literature as much as cookbooks — note that the instruction is addressed to the dispenser and ends in winning a customer's patronage, not in a serving suggestion. Root beer had moved from a home-brewed, mildly fermented sassafras and wintergreen drink to a commercial soda syrup over the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Hires being the best-known American brand, and by the time books like this were written it was a widely available fountain flavor. Pairing it with dairy was well established: the root beer float, sometimes called a "black cow" — a name also recorded for cola floats and for chocolate-containing versions — is the ice cream version of the same idea, and this cream float is its quicker cousin, needing no scoop and no hardening cabinet.