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Cream Beer
Two and one-fourth pounds white sugar, two pounds of tartaric acid, and the juice of two lemons and three pints of water. Boil together five minutes. When nearly cold, add the whites of three eggs well beaten, half a cupful of flour well beaten, one-half ounce of wintergreen essence. Bottle and keep in a cool place. Use two tablespoonfuls of the syrup in a tumbler of ice-water. Add one-fourth teaspoonful of soda just at the moment you wish to drink, but shake the bottle of syrup before using. It is cool and refreshing.
GATHER the fruit, stem, wash and mash it; strain through a coarse linen bag, and to every gallon of the juice add three pounds of good brown sugar. Let it stand nine days, and then pour it off from the pulp which will settle in the bottom of the jar. Bottle it closely, and the longer you keep it the better it is. Take a pitcher that will hold as much as you want to use, fill it nearly full of fresh sweetened water, add a few drops of essence of lemon. To every gallon of sweetened water add a halftumblerful of beer. This is a favorite drink in the Southern States of America, and is healthful.
Two drinks are run together in this entry: a wintergreen soda syrup and a fermented tomato drink. Both have problems that cannot be edited around, and the acid quantity in the first is the serious one.
- The tartaric acid is out of rangeTwo pounds of tartaric acid to three pints of water is far more acid than any drinking syrup should contain. At these proportions two tablespoonfuls would carry something on the order of ten grams of tartaric acid, which is within the range at which serious harm has been reported. It may be a misprint that has been reprinted faithfully, though nothing in the text says so.
- Raw egg white in a stored syrupThree beaten egg whites are stirred into a syrup that is only "nearly cold," then bottled and kept for days. Nothing here reaches a pasteurising temperature, and the eggs give Salmonella a protein-rich medium to sit in. The extreme acidity would inhibit but not reliably kill it.
- Wintergreen essence is not flavouring extractHalf an ounce of oil of wintergreen is methyl salicylate, which is genuinely toxic in small volumes -- a teaspoon is equivalent to a large aspirin overdose. Nineteenth-century "essence" was sometimes a dilute alcoholic tincture and sometimes the neat oil, and the recipe does not say which. That ambiguity alone rules the formula out.
- Tomato beer is an uncontrolled fermentRaw tomato juice and brown sugar left to stand nine days in a jar, then bottled closely, relies entirely on wild yeast. There is no starter, no acidity measurement and no temperature given. Sealed bottles of an active ferment also build pressure with nothing to vent it.
- What the flour was forWhat the flour may have been for -- the half cupful of beaten flour, with the egg whites, was most likely there to give the syrup body and a clouded, creamy look in the glass when the soda was added. That is the usual explanation offered for the 'cream' in cream beer, though the recipe itself does not say.
- How it was meant to workThe quarter-teaspoon of soda stirred in at the last moment reacts with the acid syrup to fizz the drink in the tumbler. This is the standard home imitation of a soda fountain, and it is why the acid is present at all. If you want the effect, use a current soda-syrup recipe with measured citric or tartaric acid.
"Cream beer" in American household books of this period often means something other than beer, though the category also includes genuinely fermented cream beers. It is frequently a temperance drink: a bottled acid-and-sugar syrup, a spoonful in a glass of ice water, and a pinch of bicarbonate stirred in to make it foam -- the home version of what a druggist's soda fountain sold across the counter. Wintergreen, sassafras, sarsaparilla and lemon were the usual flavours, and the egg white and flour may well have been added to give the glass the pale, slightly opaque head that would justify the word cream. Tomato beer belongs to a different tradition, the long American habit of fermenting whatever fruit was abundant into a low-alcohol summer drink; this book describes it as a Southern country beverage, and the claim that it is "healthful" reflects the period's confidence that a mild ferment settled the stomach rather than any evidence.