Soda Cream
Four quarts water, six pounds coffee sugar, six ounces tartaric acid, whites of five eggs beaten to a stiff froth, six cents worth of oil wintergreen cut in alcohol; mix altogether and cork in a jug. When wanted for use, pour a little in a tumbler, add a pinch of soda for foam. It is a pleasant and healthy drink for warm weather.
This is a home version of a soda-fountain syrup: an acid-and-sugar base that fizzes when a pinch of bicarbonate is stirred in at the glass. Two things in it put the recipe out of reach today, and a third makes it unmeasurable.
- Raw egg white, stored warmRaw egg white, stored unrefrigerated -- Five uncooked whites are stirred into a syrup that is then corked in a jug and drawn on as wanted. Nothing is ever heated and the jug is not chilled, so this is a room-temperature raw-egg product with an open-ended holding time. The syrup is both very acid and very sugary, which will inhibit growth to some degree, but that is not a controlled preservation step and the recipe should not be treated as safe on that basis.
- Oil of wintergreenOil of wintergreen is almost pure methyl salicylate, and it is genuinely poisonous by the teaspoon; a single teaspoon carries salicylate equivalent to a large handful of aspirin tablets, and it is a recognised cause of fatal poisoning in children. It was sold as a flavouring in tiny quantities, but it has no safe place in a jug of drinking syrup made at home.
- "Six cents worth"The quantity of wintergreen oil is given as a price, not a measure. Nineteenth-century druggists sold flavouring oils by the dram at prices that varied by town and year, so there is no honest conversion — the recipe does not tell you how much of the dangerous ingredient to add.
- Tartaric acidSix ounces of tartaric acid to four quarts is the fizz mechanism, reacting with the pinch of bicarbonate in the tumbler. Food-grade tartaric acid is still sold for winemaking and baking, and is not the problem here; it is the raw egg and the wintergreen that are.
- Coffee sugarA period name for a coarse-crystal sugar, sometimes lightly refined and faintly yellow, sold for sweetening coffee. Ordinary granulated sugar is its nearest descendant. Six pounds to four quarts of water gives a heavy syrup meant to be diluted a spoonful at a time.
- "A pinch of soda"Bicarbonate of soda, added at the glass rather than the jug — the effervescence has to be generated in front of the drinker. The instruction is sound soda-fountain practice; it is the base syrup that cannot be made.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe for a shrub or an acid phosphate syrup from a modern soda-fountain source, where the egg and the wintergreen have both been dropped.
Before bottled soft drinks were cheap and universal, the fizzing glass was a fountain product, and cookbooks of the later nineteenth century are full of attempts to bring the drugstore counter home. The chemistry is straightforward and old: a fixed acid in the syrup, an alkali added at the last moment, and carbon dioxide raised in the tumbler itself, as in the powders sold by the same druggists. Egg white was added to soda syrups for body and a lasting head, and it is often said, though not documented, that this is the ancestor of the egg cream and of the various "cream" sodas whose names long outlived any dairy in them. Wintergreen, also known as checkerberry, along with sarsaparilla and birch, belonged to a family of sharp North American medicinal flavours that Victorians seem to have read as wholesome rather than merely sweet, which may be why the writer can call the result "pleasant and healthy" without irony. Pricing an ingredient in cents rather than drams was normal in books of this kind: the reader was expected to walk to the druggist and ask, and the druggist knew what six cents bought.