Root Beer Floats and Black Cows

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Vlasta from Colby, Wisconsin.

Hi, Vlasta from Colby, Wisconsin. We’re glad to have you on the show.

Thank you. I’m excited to be able to look into my question about some terminology regarding root beer floats.

Growing up in northern Illinois, we always referred to them at home anyway as black cows with ice cream and root beer.

Okay. Then when I moved to Wisconsin, they keep saying root beer float everywhere. No one uses the black cow phrase at all.

Oh, no. Okay. Have you heard brown cow in Wisconsin?

I have, but only from one person. A friend of mine uses the word brown cow, and she even made one for me. It’s, according to her, chocolate ice cream in root beer.

Okay, gotcha. So your question is, what’s up with that?

Right. Is it a regional thing, difference from state to state, or is black cow something my family made up?

It’s more than your family. It’s actually a fairly widespread term, and you’ll find it as far back as the 1920s. Now, there are a lot of asterisks and footnotes on this, and many of them have to do with what’s in a black cow or a brown cow.

So the ingredients can vary quite a bit. One definition I find from 1922, tell me how this sounds to you. So you take a tall iced tea glass, you put three tablespoons of thick cream, a teaspoon of sugar, a few drops of lemon juice, and then you fill it with ginger ale. So there’s no root beer at all.

Oh, no, I’ve never heard of that. I’ve never tried that. And you’ll find that again and again until the 19, well into the 1930s, that the recipe tends to be all over the place. But what it does have in common is always some kind of dairy, which is why the cow is in the name. And then there’s usually something dark. So it’s either a dark drink or a dark syrup.

So some of the recipes, for example, have a Heyers extract and a Heyers was a root beer syrup.

Oh, interesting. I never would have thought of variations in the recipes.

Yeah. Such variations. Yeah, many of them. And then Martha, I don’t know if you have, have you ever had a purple cow, Martha? Because there’s other kinds of cows.

Yeah, that’s grape soda and vanilla ice cream, right?

Yeah. And you can have like pink cow, which is strawberry soda and ice cream. And then in the Spanish speaking countries in South America, they have even more names for it. But they’ll call it a black cow, a vaca negra or a vaca preta. So they’ll, they’ll, means black cow. And then they’ll have one which is mixed with guarana, which is a local fruit called a golden cow, which I love.

Oh, a golden cow. That’s interesting. And then here’s another one. Oh, I’m having fun with this. Food ones are always the best.

In Australia and New Zealand, particularly in Australia, like in Victoria and southeastern South Australia, they call them spiders.

Yeah. And so you could have a lime spider or an orange spider.

Spider. Same drink. It’s ice cream and a soda. You get a lot of these fun soda fountain drinks, you know, from the era when we had soda fountains in drugstores and that kind of thing. Mudfizz and Black and White.

Part of the reason that we have these fun names is there was this era when everybody was enjoying coining new soda jerk slang, as they were called. And so you would get all these lists of soda jerk slang being passed around in newspapers and various periodicals. But people would just have a really good time making new ones.

It’s about the time that the diner slang really kind of went nuts. And a lot of it was never really used. It kind of only exists on the list, but black cow is for sure, and brown cow is for sure, a real term that is still used today and you can still find on menus.

I’m going to look for some new recipes now.

Very interesting. I will say there are old cookbooks on Google Books and Internet archives. So if you kind of restrict your cookbook date to, say, the 1920s and 1930s, you’ll come up with those old recipes and you can give them a try.

Yes. Oh, great. Well, you have much more background information than I ever thought would be available.

We should do this for a living, Marcia.

I thought it was kind of a regional thing.

I was going to say, that’s what we do, Blasta.

All right. You take care of yourself now, Blasta.

That’s true. Thank you very much for all that information.

All right. Bye-bye.

Sure thing. Take care.

You too. Bye.

Bye.

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