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Coffee Egg Shake
Mix two tablespoonfuls of coffee syrup with two tablespoonfuls of sweet cream, add one egg and cracked ice. Shake thoroughly, strain into glass, and fill up with cold milk.
A soda-fountain egg shake of the temperance era, built on raw egg shaken with ice and served immediately. The egg is never heated at any point, which is why this one belongs on the page as a historical document rather than in a shaker.
- The raw egg is the problemThe whole egg goes in uncooked and stays uncooked; nothing in the method exceeds refrigerator temperature. Salmonella in an intact shell egg is the specific risk, and cracked ice and cold milk do nothing to reduce it. A fountain drink of this kind would have been mixed and served on the spot; a carton egg bought today has a longer and less traceable history behind it.
- Not helped by the dairyCream and milk of this date may or may not have been pasteurised, and the standard varied by city and supplier. Whatever the dairy, the raw egg remains uncooked. If you want an egg-based fountain drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurised shell eggs or pasteurised liquid egg.
- Coffee syrupFor context: this is not brewed coffee but a thick sweetened coffee concentrate, once a standard fountain bottle and still sold commercially in Rhode Island, where it flavours coffee milk. Two tablespoonfuls of it carries both the sugar and the coffee flavour of the drink.
- "Sweet cream"Sweet cream meant simply cream that had not soured, as distinct from the sour cream and clabbered milk also in ordinary use. It is nearer to modern light cream than to heavy whipping cream.
- Shaking, not blendingThe instruction is to shake with cracked ice and then strain it out, so the ice acts as the agitator rather than as an ingredient. The result was frothy and cold rather than thick; the drink was never meant to be a milkshake in the modern sense.
Egg drinks were a fixture of the American soda fountain long before Prohibition, sold as much for nourishment as for refreshment — an egg shaken into milk was often said to make a light meal for invalids, clerks and children. Books of this kind were published as the temperance movement gathered force in the years before the Eighteenth Amendment. Coffee syrup belonged to the same commercial world as the fountain's chocolate and vanilla syrups, supplied by the barrel to druggists who doubled as dispensers of cold drinks, and it survives most visibly today in the coffee milk of Rhode Island.