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Imperial Grape Egg
To eight tablespoonfuls of sweet cream and four tablespoonfuls of grape juice, add one egg and about three tablespoonfuls of shaved ice. Sweeten with a little sugar and shake thoroughly. Strain, and serve with straws.
This is a soda-fountain drink built on a whole raw egg that is never heated at any stage. That single point governs everything else about it.
- The raw egg is the problemThe egg goes in shell-fresh, is shaken with cold cream and ice, strained, and drunk. Nothing in the glass reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean egg. Shaking with ice lowers the temperature rather than raising it.
- No acid or alcohol doing any workOther egg drinks at least put something in the glass that works against bacteria over time: spirits in a proper flip, strong citrus in an egg sour left to stand. Neither is reliable pasteurisation. Four tablespoons of grape juice against eight of sweet cream offers even less than that, and the drink is served immediately.
- "Sweet cream" meant raw cream"Sweet cream" meant unsoured cream -- In a book of this vintage "sweet cream" means cream that has not soured, and depending on where and when it was bought it may well have been unpasteurised. Combined with a raw egg, that would double the exposure rather than adding a second flavour.
- Served to whoever ordered itServed to whoever drank it -- Drinks of this type were commonly given to children, invalids and the elderly — precisely the groups for whom an invasive Salmonella infection is most dangerous. The period recommended raw egg drinks as a tonic for the weak.
- Shaved ice was not clean iceShaved ice is an ingredient here -- The three tablespoonfuls of shaved ice melt into the finished glass; they are not a chilling medium that gets discarded, so whatever is in the ice ends up in the drink.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe from a source that specifies pasteurised egg or a heated custard base. The proportions above are not the difficulty; the method is, and it cannot be patched by adjusting them.
- For reading, not makingEight tablespoons is half a cup, four is a quarter cup, and the whole thing yields a single tall glass — useful for picturing what was handed across the marble, and nothing more.
Grape juice occupies an outsized place in temperance-era drink books because it was the one fruit juice with a moral pedigree: Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist, began bottling pasteurised "unfermented wine" in the 1860s expressly so congregations could take communion without alcohol, and by the 1900s the product had become the standard respectable stand-in for wine at any table that had signed the pledge. Books written for the soda fountain and the dry household — the water-wagon literature — leaned on it hard, and the trick was to make it feel like something more than juice. Hence the egg and cream: shaking a whole egg into a cold drink gave it body, foam and a rich mouthfeel, borrowing the whole architecture of the bar-room flip while leaving out the spirit, and the word "Imperial" did the rest of the work. The practice is often traced to the same fountain repertoire that produced egg phosphates and egg lemonades, all of which treated a raw egg as an ordinary nutritive ingredient in a way no commercial recipe would today.