The Black Cow
The black cow is another fountain staple, and the favorite drink of my father-in-law. It goes like this. Pour about two tablespoons of chocolate syrup into your favorite glass.
Pour in about a cup of root beer.
Stir to blend.
Top with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream.
And that’s it, baby. Serve with both a straw and a spoon! A brown cow substitutes Coke for the root beer. A white cow substitutes vanilla syrup for the chocolate and milk for the root beer.
Lost me on the root beer. Nasty stuff. LOL
I don’t know you.
Actually read to the bottom for brown cow and white cow variations.
– Joe
HAHA…I see you did allow for those of us who detest the stuff. 🙂 I even have a bottle of it in my house to make a root beer cake but can never bring myself to use the stuff. Otherwise it does look good. I love Coke floats! Even better I love ice cream floats using Trader Joe’s sparkling blueberry “soda”. Quite good. So is Whole Food’s blood orange Italian soda. Great photos!
Looks great!
Once when I bought some lambic frambois as a novelty (I’m not a beer drinker), the guy who sold it to me suggested pouring it over vanilla ice cream. I couldn’t have conceived of anything more odd than beer and ice cream. But, you know what? It was pretty wonderful and certainly different. I wonder if that might have been a Drunken Cow….
Maybe I should be asking my husband. As a farm boy from upstate NY he had to deal with his share of cows who got drunk on the apples that fermented in one or the other of their stomachs before they made it all the way through. ;>
I’ve heard of blind cows that are fed the leftover mash from making some liquor (probably whiskey). Maybe it would be a Blind Cow. 🙂
oooooooo! That’s kinda sad. …if I’m correctly understanding that the cows actually go blind from the high alcohol content of the feed like people also can from too much unrefined alcohol.
IF that’s the case, seems like the farmers could spend a little on appropriate feed to mix with it to desaturate the alcohol content. Or compost the spent mash. Or put it in some spent grain bread which is delicious. I am always looking for a good source of spent grain.
Delicious. Root beer is up there at the top for me, along with cream soda, ginger ale, and lemon-lime soda.
Red Cow. Substitute Birch Beer for the Root Beer.
Roger, that was nice!
Thanks!
– Joe
I’m so glad to see that you know of these treats, Joe. I offered to make them for my husband once and he wrinkled his nose up like he was six and I was trying to force feed him liver and onions. Ha.
Just mail them to me. I’m always an appreciative audience. My older daughter has been simply amazed by these. Nine years old and never had a black cow until yesterday. Blew her tiny mind!
– Joe
I’m sure the sugar high had nothing to do with that…. 🙂
Definitely not. She’s an epicure. 😉
– J
In Australia we make something similar, it doesn’t have any syrup in it and you traditionally use a brightly coloured soft drink like lime, raspberry, orange or coke. We call it a spider. Big hit at school mufti (non uniform) days.
Sounds like our “floats”. I’ll get to those! Thanks Jess!
– Joe
I used to get Coke floats (brown cow) as a treat when I was a kid. I haven’t had one in years. I have coke, ice cream and syrup at hand. I think I’ll treat myself.
My boss (from Manhattan) talks about egg creams. I’ve never heard of them and the recipe sounds very unusual. Will you be making one so I can see how it’s done?
Hey Ellen! Just scroll down. That was the first one I made!
– Joe
Sorry Joe, I overlooked it (busy week). My boss said that only Fox’s U-Bet syrup made a proper egg cream. The drink still sounds odd to me but nothing ventured, nothing gained and my local Wal-Mart has Fox’s syrup in the kosher foods section.
Yeah, those New Yorkers put a lot of conditions on their egg creams. You have to order that stuff over the internet if you don’t live near New York. I don’t doubt it gives egg creams the taste New Yorkers grew up with, but I’m only willing to go so far for authenticity.
– Joe
For your reading pleasure. Being a Bronx girl, I take exception to the “Brooklyn” name in the egg cream (we won’t even discuss the hyphen), but what the heck. For Passover they make it with sugar rather than HFCS (ditto Coke), which sells out like that
http://www.zabars.com/Fox%27s-U-Bet-Original-Chocolate-Syrup—22oz/A2DN001,default,pd.html
Love that. Thanks, Chana!
– Joe
Now your talking… great memories from my childhood. But given a fair amount of lactose intolerance there always was a dark side to these treats. But when indulging… it was ice cream and soda of almost any kind that made my day (for a while). 🙂
Twenty-two comments, and no one has mentioned the entirely obvious and predictable Steely Dan connection? I am as a specialist in the obvious and predictable, so please allow me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY_FI9J1poQ
Well not everyone else is as old as we are. Plus I hate to foist my Steely passions on others.
– J
In Hong Kong black cow is coke plus vanilla ice cream!
We just call that a “float” Henry — and they’re great. 😉
– Joe