It all started, as so many bad things do, with someone wanting to make more money.
It started with a guy named Ray, who sold paper cups for a living. This was during the Depression, when it was hard to sell anything. But, being an astute businessman, Ray figured out that he could sell more paper cups if people bought more drinks.So when one of his customers came up with an ice milk product that could be used to make colder, cheaper milkshakes, Ray knew this was a bandwagon he should jump on. He convinced another of his customers, who owned a chain of ice cream parlors in Chicago, to try out this new-fangled, cheaper milkshake. Pretty soon Ray was selling 5 million paper cups a year to the guy.
Then the ice cream parlor owner decided he could make more money if he invented a machine that could make more than one milkshake at once. What he came up with was "The Multimixer," which could shake up five drinks all at the same time! Ray was so impressed that he quit his paper-cup job and began selling Multimixers.
After a while he noticed that there was a little hamburger stand in San Bernardino, Calif., that had bought 10 of his beverage machines. What could they be doing with so many, Ray wanted to know. So he buzzed out to California to have a look at the little hamburger stand, a place called McDonald's.
Of course you know what happened next. Ray Kroc bought the franchise rights to McDonald's, made a fortune and ruined the milkshake forever.
Here are the facts: Kroc took a perfectly fine drink and added more milk solids. He added the perfect stabilizers. He created a shake so thick and cold you practically hyperventilate trying to suck the thing through a straw.
A whole generation has grown up exercising cheek muscles on fast-food shakes; has grown up thinking that this is the way milkshakes are supposed to be.
But most fast-food shakes aren't really milkshakes (OK, they use milk solids, but no one pours in any actual milk). They are not, technically, even shakes. No person or machine has actually shaken anything to produce them. The fast-food worker pours a "shake mix" into a machine that freezes it and squirts it out. An "extruded milk product," Deseret News restaurant critic Al Church calls it.
And that's not all. When Ray Kroc popularized his fast-food shake, he even changed the way other food establishments make milkshakes, even the places that actually shake them up.
"They make the best shakes," people will say about a place like the Iceberg on 3900 South and 900 East. "They're so thick!" They're even thicker than the ones at McDonald's. They're so thick they don't even come with a straw. They're so thick that when you go around a corner too fast and the thing falls over on your dashboard, nothing flows out."
I know I'm going against the grain here, but I'd like to sing the praises, just for a moment, of the thin milkshake. The kind that I used to drink at Metcalf's Cafe in Four Corners, Md., when I was 11. This was just before the dawn of fast food, in that time of darkness when ketchup did not yet come in tiny plastic packets.
The milkshakes at Metcalf's were served in a tall metal container that came right off the milkshake machine, a machine whose whirr was melodic and magical and nearly drowned out the jukebox. The metal container kept the shake cold, but, more importantly, it contained enough milkshake to fill your glass more than once. The milkshake was thin enough to have bubbles but thick enough so that little globs of ice cream plopped into your glass.
In Utah you can still get such a milkshake, but you have to request it - which can make a person feel sort of fussy and neurotic.
Snelgrove ice cream parlors used to have both thick and thin shakes listed on their menus. But so few people ordered the thin ones, says Snelgrove marketing director Steve Hoth, that now they just say "milkshakes" and mean thick ones.
"Utah has the thickest shakes around," says Richard Russell, a co-owner of Russell's Ice Cream, which sells shake mixes to local fast-food restaurants and soft-serve stands. Back East, he says, people tend to like their shakes thinner. He doesn't mean to, but he makes this sound like sort of a character flaw.
Ice cream parlors such as Snelgrove, Baskin Robbins and the Sweet Shoppe at the University of Utah's Union Building use real ice cream in their shakes. "It's richer, creamier and tastier," says Snelgrove's Hoth. The downside, of course, is that the fat content hovers somewhere around 8 percent (less if the milkshake is made really thin).
Other places, such as the Iceberg and Hire's, use an ice-milk mix, which is more convenient, less expensive and not as fat-laden (about 5 percent) as milkshakes made with ice cream. The end product is smoother and can stand up high above the cup, a pompadour of a dessert that is really eaten with a spoon.
A McDonald's kind of shake is thinner and lower in fat content - about 2 percent.
If you make your own milkshakes at home, you can make them as thick or as thin as you want, although you won't be able to re-create that graininess of a McDonald's shake or the spectacular thickness of a shake made from a soft-serve ice-milk mix.
There are two main factors that determine a homemade milkshake's thickness. The first, of course, is the ice cream-to-milk ratio. According to food critics Jane and Michael Stern, authors of "Taste of America," "a good starting formula for a shake that is fairly thick but can still be sucked up through a straw is four scoops of ice cream to a cup of milk."
The second factor is the milkshake machine. Any blender will do just fine. But the ones with a wand and small, rectangular blades work best, say the Sterns, if you want a thicker shake. "Blenders with large knifelike blades tend to pulverize the ice cream quickly, yielding a too-thin shake."
As for flavoring, add the Sterns, "the shakemaker's friend is pure vanilla extract. (You should use a dash even in a chocolate shake.)"
Thick or thin, milkshakes are the quintessential American drink, the yardstick we really ought to use when we say "It's as American as Mom and . . . ."
The problem, though, is that we tend to outgrow milkshakes. As the Sterns lament: "One of the sad things about growing up is that adult life contains no milkshakes."
Think about it, write the Sterns: "When was the last time you saw milkshakes on the menu of a serious restaurant? Can you imagine asking a waiter for the kitchen's suggestion of a beverage to accompany your surf 'n' turf, and having him respond, `Yes, monsieur, tonight the chef recommends a double chocolate milkshake, extra thick, with a spoucon of malt powder."