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South Haven Float
Make a lemonade, leave shaved ice in and float a teaspoonful creme de rose, then float ½ ounce grape juice on top. Serve straws and in fancy lemonade glass.
A fountain drink built in layers rather than stirred, so the order of operations is the whole recipe. Assemble it in the glass and carry it to the table before the bands of color blur.
- Fountain lemonadeSoda-fountain lemonade of the period was typically the juice of a lemon with an ounce or so of plain simple syrup, filled with cold water; the recipe gives no proportions. Mix it in the glass, then pack in the shaved ice as directed rather than shaking with ice, which would dilute the base and work against the layering.
- Creme de roseThis is a rose-flavored fountain syrup, not a liqueur despite the name. Bottled rose syrup sold for Middle Eastern and Indian cooking is the closest current equivalent; a teaspoon is plenty, since it reads as perfume in larger doses.
- Grape juiceProbably unfermented bottled grape juice, the sweet purple kind; the recipe does not specify a variety. Being sweeter than the lemonade beneath it, it will tend to sink unless poured with care.
- How to floatPour the syrup and then the juice slowly over the back of a spoon held just above the ice. The shaved ice is what holds the layers apart, so leaving it in is not optional.
- Shaved iceShaved, not cubed. A blender pulse or a hand ice shaver gives the loose snow texture that suspends the float; cubes let the grape juice channel straight to the bottom.
- Glass and yieldOne drink, served as directed in a fancy lemonade glass. Straws are part of the specification.
South Haven is a small port on the Lake Michigan fruit belt, and by the early twentieth century it was known for peaches, berries and grapes shipped by steamer to Chicago. The recipe belongs to the golden age of the American soda fountain, when drugstore dispensers worked from books of hundreds of formulas and competed on presentation as much as flavor. "Floats" of colored syrup layered over shaved ice were showpieces made at the counter in front of the customer. Unfermented grape juice had its own place in that world: it was widely promoted by temperance-minded companies as the respectable alternative to wine, which made it a natural fountain stock item in the years surrounding Prohibition.