Order a milkshake in Boston at a shop that still keeps the old distinction and you can get exactly what you asked for: milk and flavoring, beaten until it foams. No ice cream. The thicker drink, the one visitors usually mean, is a frappe.
Not every counter still bothers. Plenty of menus now use milkshake the way the rest of the country does. The shops that list both drinks are not offering two sizes of the same thing. Those are the last places where a milkshake in Boston and a frappe are different orders.
What goes into a milkshake in Boston
The traditional local milkshake is milk plus a flavoring, often chocolate syrup, shaken or blended until air gets into it. A frappe adds ice cream.
Yankee’s account of the two drinks is useful on a point people skip: the milkshake is not a glass of chocolate milk. Stirring syrup into milk mixes the ingredients. Blending them is what makes it a fountain order.
If a menu lists both, look at the prices before treating the cheaper one as a deal. You may be comparing a milk drink with one that has scoops in it.
Say “frap”
The regional drink is one syllable, rhyming with map. The American Heritage Dictionary records that pronunciation and treats the noun as regional usage, mapping it to Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Shops in Boston still put it on the board.
That entry is a different word from “frappé,” two syllables, which the same dictionary defines as a frozen fruit dessert or a drink poured over shaved ice. The spelling overlap is how visitors end up performing French at a Jamaica Plain counter.
A shop owner paid for the lesson
Vincent Petryk, who later opened JP Licks, learned the difference as a newcomer from Philadelphia. Boston.com reported that he ordered a milkshake at Bailey’s in the 1970s, saw that it cost half as much as the frappe, and then asked where the ice cream was. Bailey’s is gone. The mix-up is not.
The same report found “frappe” in late-nineteenth-century Boston Globe pages attached to chilled and partly frozen drinks, including alcoholic ones, long before it settled on the ice-cream version. Recipes a few years later included cafe frappes and pineapple frappes, sometimes with a scoop of ice cream already in the mix.
Boston University food scholars told the paper that regional names for ordinary foods were common before national food media flattened the vocabulary. Megan Elias, who directs BU’s gastronomy program, pointed to a 1920s overlap: Prohibition pushed people toward new places to sit, and electric equipment made ice cream cheaper to produce in volume. Soda fountains did well in that gap. The scholars also said the exact reason this particular word stuck here is not established.
There is no inventor to toast and no afternoon when Boston renamed the milkshake. The term showed up in more than one drink, attached itself to the ice-cream one, and stayed.
The word is still on the menu
JP Licks still lists a regular frappe, an extra-thick frappe, and an espresso frappe, separate from smoothies, frozen coffee, ice-cream sodas, and floats. Extra-thick is a texture, not a citizenship test.
In 2023, Mark Parrish, president of Crescent Ridge Dairy in Sharon, told Boston.com his shop still served the ice-cream-free milkshake next to the frappe and asked customers which they wanted. He also said tourists, students, and younger customers increasingly ask for a milkshake. Other counters have given up and will put ice cream in whatever you called it.
Rhode Island complicates the map again. In parts of that state, and into southeastern Massachusetts, the ice-cream drink is a cabinet. Same general idea. Different word.
This is the same class of local vocabulary as why Bostonians say “wicked.” Get the word wrong and you can still have a conversation. Get this one wrong and you may drink a glass of flavored milk.
If the menu says milkshake and you want ice cream in it, ask. You do not need to win the regional argument first.
