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Hot Coffee with Strawberry
Break one egg into a shaker with one and one half tablespoonfuls each of vanilla and strawberry syrups and two tablespoonfuls of rich cream. Shake well, pour into glass, and fill up with hot coffee. Add whipped cream.
A soda-fountain drink from the era when the fountain was replacing the bar. It cannot be made safely as written, and the reason is the whole egg.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole egg is shaken cold with syrup and cream, poured into a glass, and topped with hot coffee. Nothing in that sequence reliably brings the egg to a pasteurizing temperature. Coffee is brewed around 195F but is served cooler, and here it is poured over a cold glass, cold cream and cold syrup, so the finished drink is very unlikely to reach the 160F usually cited for eggs.
- Why hot liquid is not a fixEven if the coffee did arrive hot enough, pouring it over a shaken egg gives you scrambled threads at the edges and raw egg in the middle rather than an evenly heated custard.
- Whipped cream on topThe finishing float of whipped cream insulates the surface and slows cooling further, which is pleasant to drink and unhelpful for any hope of the egg heating through.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or liquid pasteurized egg, or one that cooks the base as a custard. We are not going to supply times and temperatures for this one.
- The syrups, for referenceVanilla and strawberry syrups here are fountain syrups: heavy sugar syrups. A tablespoon and a half of each in a single cup makes a markedly sweet drink by modern taste.
- "Rich cream"Probably something close to what is now sold as light or table cream rather than heavy whipping cream, which would be richer than the drink seems to want.
- The shakerThe recipe calls only for a shaker, and no ice is mentioned. Yield is one glass.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of temperance drink books published as Prohibition sentiment gathered force, a 1919 collection whose subtitle stresses drinks made at home. Egg drinks were a fountain staple in that trade: the egg phosphate, the egg cream, the egg malted, all sold on the understanding that a raw egg was nourishment rather than indulgence, and druggists who ran fountains were happy to have it thought of that way. Combining an egg base with hot coffee and fruit syrup recalls the older tavern flip, which married egg, sugar and spirit and was warmed with a hot iron — a resemblance rather than a documented line of descent; strip out the liquor, substitute coffee for the heat and strawberry syrup for the sweetening, and you have this glass. The whipped cream on top is the fountain's signature.