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Hot Chocolate Egg
Beat one egg with two tablespoonfuls of cream until very light. Add one tablespoonful of vanilla syrup, one tablespoonful of chocolate paste, and two teaspoonfuls of hot coffee. Shake well and strain into glass and fill up with hot water. A little nutmeg or cinnamon may be added.
A soda-fountain egg drink of the Prohibition era, built the way a dispenser built them: syrups from the rail, a raw egg, and hot water from the urn. The method is the problem.
- The egg is never cookedA whole raw egg is beaten with cream and diluted with hot water. Depending on how hot the water is and how much of it goes into the glass, the finished drink is likely to end up well short of any pasteurising temperature, and in any case it is drunk warm rather than held. Nothing in the sequence reliably brings the egg to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella.
- Why 1919 was untroubled by itEgg phosphates, egg lemonades and egg chocolates were standard counter items, made with a fresh egg cracked to order and drunk at once. The modern egg supply chain and the modern understanding of egg-borne Salmonella cut the other way. If you want a hot chocolate drink with body, use a current recipe.
- Chocolate pasteNot a modern product. Chocolate pastes of the period were cocoa cooked with sugar and water to a thick, spreadable concentrate, dosed by the spoonful. Chocolate syrup is its nearest living relative, though thinner and sweeter.
- Vanilla syrupSimple syrup flavoured with vanilla extract, another rail staple, and much less sweet in the glass than it sounds because fountain syrups were cut heavily with soda or water.
- "Shake well"Presumably done in a shaker cup; mechanical counter mixers were in use by this period. The straining step would catch the chalazae and any unbeaten white, which is what separates a smooth egg drink from a lumpy one.
- Two teaspoonfuls of coffeeA seasoning rather than an ingredient, used the way a pinch of salt is used in chocolate work. The bitterness sharpens cocoa that has been sweetened twice over, by the paste and again by the vanilla syrup.
- YieldOne glass, roughly six to eight ounces once filled up with hot water.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small flood of books published as national Prohibition came into view, all built on the same premise: the bar is closing, so here is what to drink instead. The title is the period idiom for teetotalism, being "on the water wagon." Many of the recipes appear to draw on the soda-fountain repertoire, since the fountain was the institution ready to inherit the bar's counter, its stools and its custom of a drink made to order in front of you. Egg drinks like this one had been fountain standards for decades before Prohibition; they were sold partly as refreshment and partly as nourishment, in an era when a beaten egg in milk or chocolate was widely regarded as an invalid's food and a working man's quick meal. The hot version would have belonged to winter trade, when the soda side of the business slowed and dispensers are said to have leaned on hot drinks to keep the counter busy.