Home › Fruit Drinks and Cider › Country Gentleman
Country Gentleman
Break an egg into a shaker and add four tablespoonfuls of vanilla syrup, twelve tablespoonfuls of sweet cider, and six tablespoonfuls of shaved ice. Shake well and strain into a glass, adding a little soda water with the syphon.
A soda-fountain "cider egg" from the temperance era: whole raw egg, sweetened cider and seltzer, shaken cold. Two of its three main ingredients are ones current food-safety practice treats as hazards, so the notes below explain the drink rather than adapt it.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whole egg goes into the shaker and into the glass without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shaking with ice does nothing to the pathogen load, and the drink is served immediately to be swallowed at once.
- Sweet cider means unpasteurizedSweet cider means unfermented -- In this period "sweet cider" generally meant fresh-pressed apple juice, unfermented and in most cases given no heat treatment, though some was preserved by boiling or chemical means. Fresh cider has been repeatedly linked to E. coli O157:H7 and Cryptosporidium; the alcohol that makes hard cider comparatively inhospitable is absent here.
- The two risks compoundA raw-egg drink and an untreated fruit juice are each grounds for caution on their own. Combined in a cold, unacidified, immediately consumed glass, there is no step anywhere in the procedure that reduces either. If you want a cider egg cream, use a current recipe built on pasteurized cider and pasteurized shell eggs.
- Vanilla syrupA fountain syrup, not an extract: roughly a heavy sugar syrup flavored with vanilla, of the sort a druggist kept in a pump jar. Four tablespoonfuls is a quarter cup, which tells you how sweet these drinks ran.
- The measurementsTwelve tablespoonfuls of cider is three-quarters of a cup; six of shaved ice is three-eighths of a cup, a generous third. With the soda added, the quantities suit a single tall fountain glass.
- SyphonA charged seltzer bottle with a lever head, standard fountain equipment before bottled soda water was cheap. It delivered carbonated water under pressure, and here it goes in last, after the mixture has been strained into the glass.
Drinks like this belong to the soda fountain's period as the respectable alternative to the saloon. Temperance advocates did not want a public simply to abstain; they wanted somewhere to go and something to hold, and the drugstore fountain supplied both, with a counter, a mirror, a uniformed dispenser and a menu of syrups. Egg drinks appeared on those menus, sold as nourishing as much as refreshing, the fountain equivalent of a flip or a nog. Sweet cider was the same apple juice that, left alone, turned into the hard cider of the farmhouse cellar.