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Garden Shake
Whip the white of one egg to a froth with eight tablespoonfuls of cream and add three tablespoonfuls of violet or rose syrup. Fill up the glass with milk.
This is a soda-fountain style egg drink, and the egg white is never heated at any point. That single fact puts it outside what can be recommended today, whatever else is done with the glass.
- The raw egg white is the problemShell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and within the white and yolk, and nothing in this drink brings the egg above room temperature. Use a current recipe if you want an egg-based drink.
- No dilution or acid to helpSome historic raw-egg drinks lean on spirits or a heavy dose of citrus. This one is egg white, cream, sugar syrup and milk — nothing here does anything to the microbial load.
- Violet and rose syrupBoth were standard fountain syrups around 1900, sold by the same suppliers as the sarsaparilla and orgeat. Rose syrup is still easy to buy from Middle Eastern and South Asian grocers; violet syrup survives mainly as a French confectioner's item, and much of what is sold now is coloured and flavoured rather than made from flowers.
- The measuresEight tablespoonfuls of cream is half a cup; three tablespoonfuls of syrup is an ounce and a half, which tells you how sweet fountain drinks of the period ran.
- Cream in 1900Fountain cream was unhomogenised, and cream of the period was often lighter than today's heavy whipping cream, closer to light cream or half-and-half.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the American temperance drink literature — collections published to prove that a bar could be run, and a guest entertained, without alcohol. The egg drinks section is the clearest evidence of that ambition: the egg flip, the egg nogg and the sherry flip were saloon staples, and the soda fountain answered them item for item with the spirits struck out and syrup, cream and milk left in. Floral syrups did much of the work of making these drinks feel like an occasion; violet in particular was fashionable in this period, turning up in pastilles, perfumes and confectionery as well as at the fountain.