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Apricot and Egg
Into a shaker one fourth full of cracked ice, break one egg, add one tablespoonful each of apricot, peach, and rose syrups, and four tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Shake thoroughly and strain into a glass. Serve with straws.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink, and the egg and cream go into the glass raw and stay that way. That is the whole problem with it.
- The raw egg is never heatedNothing in the method brings the egg above refrigerator temperature; cracked ice keeps it well below any pathogen-reducing range. A whole shell egg broken into a shaker and strained into a glass is a straightforward Salmonella Enteritidis risk, which lives inside intact, clean-looking eggs and not merely on the shell.
- Shaking does nothingAgitation with ice emulsifies the egg into the cream and syrup, which is the textural point of the drink, but it neither kills nor removes bacteria. The straining step catches chalazae and shell fragments only.
- The cream compounds itFour tablespoonfuls of sweet cream go in cold and stay cold. Depending on the supply, cream of this period might or might not have been pasteurised, and either way the recipe includes no heating step anywhere.
- Who it is worst forUncooked-egg beverages were once prescribed as invalid and convalescent food, precisely the population — the very young, the elderly, the pregnant, the immunocompromised — for whom a raw egg is now considered least appropriate.
- If you want an egg drinkUse a current recipe written for a pasteurised product. This one should be read rather than shaken.
- On the syrups, for reading purposesApricot, peach and rose syrups were among the bottled fountain syrups of the period; rose syrup in particular has largely disappeared from general use and survives mainly in Middle Eastern and South Asian groceries.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the substantial body of American temperance drink books that flourished alongside the soda fountain in the decades before national Prohibition — the title itself plays on the phrase "on the water wagon," the period slang for abstaining from liquor. It seems to have set out to show that a man could stand at a counter and be served something as elaborate, as cold and as sweet as anything a saloon offered, and egg drinks were central to that argument: the egg supplied body, foam and a claim to nourishment that a plain fruit syrup could not make. Egg phosphates and egg lemonades were fountain staples, generally traced to the working practices of nineteenth-century apothecary counters, where the dispenser mixed drinks with the same syrups and the same show of technique he used for medicines. The triple perfume of apricot, peach and rose here is a fountain man's flourish, not a folk tradition — it depends entirely on a shelf of commercial bottled syrups being close at hand.