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Hot Vanilla Egg
Beat the white of one egg and add two tablespoonfuls each of vanilla syrup and sweet cream. Fill up the glass with hot water. Put a spoonful of whipped cream on top and a little nutmeg.
A soda-fountain hot drink from the temperance era, built in the glass rather than cooked. The problem is structural: the egg white never reaches a temperature that would make it safe.
- Why this one failsThe beaten white is diluted with syrup and cream, then topped with hot water from the fountain tap and served at once. Water hot enough to drink, poured into a cold glass of egg, syrup and cream, lands well under the range at which egg proteins are pasteurized, and there is no holding time at all. Raw shell egg carries a Salmonella risk that a splash of hot water does not address.
- Not the same as egg cooked in a custardA boiled custard base does bring the egg up in a pan with constant stirring. Here the egg meets nothing hotter than tap water in the glass, which is what makes it unsuitable now. If you want a hot vanilla egg drink, work from a current recipe that specifies a cooked or pasteurized base.
- Vanilla syrupFountain syrup, not extract: roughly a 2:1 sugar syrup flavoured with vanilla, thick and sweet. Two tablespoons of it carried most of the sugar in the glass, so a modern coffee-shop vanilla syrup is far closer than a spoonful of extract.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured, as opposed to the soured or clabbered cream also kept in dairies. Something like what a US supermarket now sells as light cream, around 18 to 20 percent fat, is probably closer than heavy whipping cream, though the richness of period cream varied.
- The glassFountain glasses of this period were commonly around 8 fluid ounces, and the drink was made in the same tumbler it was served in. That leaves the hot water making up the balance after the egg, syrup and cream, roughly five to six ounces.
- NutmegGrated from the whole nut over the whipped cream, applied as a scent more than a flavour. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of that aroma within a few months of opening.
- YieldOne drink.
Books of this kind belong to the world of the soda fountain, which expanded rapidly in the United States alongside the temperance movement and again under Prohibition, when a title like On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon announced its allegiance plainly: to be "on the water wagon" was to have given up drink. Much of the fountain repertoire echoes the bar's, and egg drinks are the clearest case. The flip and the egg nogg existed first as spirituous drinks, and fountain versions were rebuilt with syrup, cream and hot water so a customer could order something rich, warm and faintly medicinal without alcohol. Egg white was valued partly for the body and foam it gave and partly because eggs were widely regarded as strengthening food, which let a sweet drink be sold as nourishment. Placing this under a "Lemon and Lime" heading reflects an arrangement by syrup and flavour rather than by the character of the finished drink.