Consider the milkshake  When is the right time for a milkshake,
and which is the best flavour? Banana, strawberry and kiwifruit
milkshakes Banana, strawberry and kiwifruit milkshakes.
Photograph: Elena Elisseeva/Alamy  The diner is a gleaming
nugget of Americana. When US culture became so dominant and
enticing around the middle of the last century, a fair portion
of its appeal lay in the chrome and Grease of those egalitarian
restaurants. The milkshake was the most important and evocative
drink of the diner, if not necessarily the most popular. (That
was soda, to be discussed anon.) Milkshakes were there to greet
the newly invented, cotching teenagers, who wanted kids' drinks
in a semi-grown-up environment.  Sweet and cool and sexy, a
milkshake represents the best of being young in summer. The
original was a thick whiskey-based affair, a kind of savoury
eggnog served to invalids. It turned up on the American east
coast in the 1880s and was probably made in a cocktail shaker,
hence "shake". By 1900 the booze h