Cream Beer
Two ounces tartaric acid, two pounds white sugar, three pints water, juice of one lemon. Boil all together. When nearly cold, add whites of three eggs, well beaten, with one-half cupful flour, and one-half ounce essence wintergreen. Bottle and keep in a cool place. Take two tablespoonfuls of this mixture for a tumbler of water, in which put one-quarter teaspoonful soda--Mrs. E.
This is a soda-fountain syrup concentrate rather than a beer: two spoonfuls in a tumbler of water with a pinch of soda gives an acid-alkali fizz at the table. Several features of it put it outside what a modern kitchen can safely reproduce.
- Raw egg white in a shelf-stored syrupThe whites go in when the syrup is "nearly cold," so they are never brought anywhere near the 160F that would make them safe, and the flour is raw as well. The bottle then sits for days or weeks in a cool larder, which is not refrigeration. Salmonella in shell eggs is the specific risk, and nothing in the process addresses it.
- The acid does not sterilise itIt is tempting to assume that two ounces of tartaric acid makes the syrup self-preserving. Acidity and high sugar do suppress a great deal, but this mixture is diluted with protein and starch and stored without a measured pH or a heat step after the eggs are added, so there is no basis for treating it as preserved.
- Half an ounce of essence of wintergreen"Essence" in a nineteenth-century kitchen might mean an alcoholic dilution or the true oil. Oil of wintergreen is methyl salicylate and is toxic in small volumes; half a fluid ounce of the oil is far beyond any modern flavouring dose. The recipe gives no way to tell which was meant, which is reason enough not to guess.
- What the soda is doingThe quarter teaspoon of bicarbonate stirred into each glass reacts with the tartaric acid in the syrup to throw off carbon dioxide. This is the same chemistry as a seidlitz powder and is why the drink foams without any brewing or yeast; the egg white and flour are there to hold that foam and give body.
- Units, for reading rather than makingThree pints is a pint over a quart, roughly 1.4 litres. Two pounds of white sugar to that volume gives a heavy syrup. A tumbler in this period is a plain straight-sided glass of about eight to ten ounces.
- If you want the drinkCream soda syrups are still made, and a current recipe with pasteurised egg white or none at all should be used instead.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, belongs to the moment when the commercial soda fountain was spreading out of the druggist's shop and into the home. "Cream beer" here has nothing to do with brewing: the word beer still covered any number of home-made effervescent drinks, from spruce beer to ginger beer to root beer, some fermented and some, like this one, fizzed chemically at the moment of serving. The pairing of tartaric acid in the syrup with bicarbonate in the glass is straight out of the pharmacist's repertoire, and wintergreen was one of the standard American fountain flavours alongside sarsaparilla and birch. The beaten egg white and flour give the head and the opaque body that a plain acid drink lacks, and may well be what the "cream" of the name refers to, though the recipe itself says nothing about how it was named. Attributions like "Mrs. E." run through the whole book, which was assembled as a collection of named neighbours' receipts rather than the work of a single author.