There seems to be a consensus of sorts that Soyer au Champagne is a champagne drink with vanilla ice cream in it. I’ve read that it was maybe a project of Alexis Soyer, but given where that tidbit seems to originate, I’m unsure how seriously to take it.
What I do have in terms of early recipes is overwhelmingly French and apparently devoid of ice cream. (But cylindrical “chalumeaux” cookies are a theme):
1889 - Emile Lefeuvre - Methode pour composer soi meme les boissons americaines, p. 46:
I think closer investigation of Lefeuvre’s introduction would be fruitful: “Soyer au Champagne is merely a simplified Champagne cobbler.” I’m confused what about it is a simplification; is it that the orange slices and raspberry syrup are a streamlined take on a complicated fruit garnish? And why would you shake it? Reading Soyer’s Wikipedia page, I would agree that “simplification,” often through application of industrial techniques, is Soyer’s contribution to culinary development. If he’s associated with ice cream, I haven’t seen the link. I’m glad Martin answered my unasked question about the identity of “chalumeaux.” I thought they might be straws. The chalumeaux are strewn liberally through many recipes in “Bariana.” Apparently these cookies originate in Occitane—was Fouquet from there? (Newman has just as many recipes with them.) I have to assume that it was easy for McElhone to mistranslate “creme de vanille” as “ice cream,” especially since the latter gained an association with chalumeaux at some point. And then he goes and recomplicates the fruit garnish! Then again, ice cream was surging in popularity at the end of the 19th century, and it might have attached itself to nearly any recipe.
Wait, what? Chalumeaux is straw.
The word both means the stem of a reed and the contraption you use to suck liquid. Indeed until the blowtorch (chalumeau in French) became popular in cocktail circles, « chalumeaux » and « paille » were used interchangeably.
Now, chalumeaux, the cookies, are common ice cream garnishes but unless specified I would by default consider any « chalumeaux » mentioned in a cocktail book as a straw.
Ha! The online translation dictionaries have completely failed us on the straw definition for chalumeaux. Google treats chalumeaux/chalumeau as (literal) blowtorch, and reserve paille for straw. Quel fiasco!
So, climbing back out of the weeds—or straw—now the question is where and whence the ice cream enters the picture.
McElhone does conclude his recipe with “A very popular beverage on the Continent.” So perhaps the ice cream is added “on the Continent” before McElhone and we’re just not seeing it in these books?
I was going to jump in to say the same thing about the chalumeaux. Also, McElhone would not make such a basic mistake in French as mistaking crème de vanille for ice cream: he left Scotland around 1904 or 1905, while still in his teens, and worked in France for the next ten years, marrying a Frenchwoman in the process. Then he was in London and, very briefly, America before joining the Royal Naval Air Service and serving in France. After the war, after three years in London and Deauville he would return to France for good–well, except for 1940-1944, where he took refuge back in London. In short, his French was excellent.
As for his Soyer au Champagne, that still needs more research.
The “Soyer au Champagne” specifies a “Soyer glass.” I don’t know the history of this glass and how it came to be named after Soyer, but my hunch is that the drink was identified with the glass, and then this glass came to be identified with ice cream drinks.
Seems pretty clear that this is the legacy of a ready-to-drink sparkling beverage that Alexis Soyer marketed, called “Soyer’s Nectar.” You could mix it with booze, and making your own champagne version would have been easy. From “Memoirs of Alexis Soyer,” 1859:
“Soyer’s Nectar” makes me think of Harry Johnson’s “orchard syrup”.
If Soyer au Champagne began as something tied to a short-lived proprietary fruit syrup, the drink nevertheless took on a life of its own, somehow. Twice.
The early recipes we have lean French and late 19th Century and hew to readily available ingredients. Soyer himself has been dead for decades. These early recipes do not seem particularly distinctive (relative to a Champagne Cobbler), yet the drink crops up in France and—as you noticed—“Soyer” even gets attached to a model of glass from Cochard & Manguin. (While Newman dutifully connects his Soyer au Champagne recipe to the glass of the same name in the diagram, I’m reluctant to give this single source much weight on its own.) Was this drink fashionable for a spell on the Continent?
Later, in the 1920s, Harry McElhone (or someone) adds the ice cream, which makes the drink much more distinctive, yielding its final form that’s still kicking around in corners.
Here’s two variants from the post-war 1947 Vermeys book, neither of which mention ice cream. One is fruit salad with champagne and straws, the other is essentially a mimosa.
