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Hot Cream Shake
Mix the white of one egg with two tablespoonfuls of sweet cream and two tablespoonfuls of vanilla syrup. Shake well and pour into a glass, fill up with hot water, and put a spoonful of whipped cream on top.
A soda-fountain temperance drink built on raw egg white. The technique is straightforward, but the central ingredient is the problem.
- The raw egg white never gets hot enoughEgg white is shaken cold with cream and syrup, then topped up with hot water. Nothing in the method holds the egg at a pasteurizing temperature for any length of time, and the cold base plus dilution makes the finished drink's temperature unpredictable at best. Treat the white as raw.
- Why the fountain got away with itRaw white is still a recognized risk food for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised. If you want a hot egg drink, use a current recipe built around pasteurized whites or a cooked custard base.
- Sweet creamNot a sweetened product. In period usage "sweet cream" simply means fresh cream as opposed to soured or cultured cream — roughly today's heavy or whipping cream.
- Vanilla syrupThe standard fountain syrup: sugar and water cooked to a heavy simple syrup, then flavored with vanilla. It is the sole sweetener here, so two tablespoons is doing real work.
- ShakingA fountain shaker was a metal tumbler worked by hand or on a spindle mixer, not a sealed cocktail shaker. The point is aeration of the white, not chilling.
- YieldOne glass. The recipe does not give a size; 'fill up with hot water' implies a single serving in fountain glassware.
Egg drinks were filling, they came with the theatre of the shaker, and they carried a long reputation as restoratives — the hot egg-and-cream drink descends from the same family as the flip and the possetted milk given to invalids. The soda fountain, which had grown up through the late nineteenth century as an adjunct to the pharmacy, was well placed to inherit the mixed-drink repertoire wholesale, syrups and shaking and garnish and all, and it did so with the whipped cream on top intact.