Home › Orange and Pineapple › Knickerbocker Shake
Knickerbocker Shake
Whip the white of one egg with six tablespoonfuls of cream and add four tablespoonfuls of orange syrup and one half glassful of cracked ice. Shake well, pour into a tall glass, and fill up with milk.
A soda-fountain shake of the sort American druggists built by the hundred before Prohibition. The measures are fountain measures, and two of them need translating before you start.
- A glassfulPeriod fountain glasses were commonly around 8 oz, though sizes varied, so half a glassful of cracked ice is roughly half a cup, loosely packed. It is there to chill and dilute, not to fill the finished drink.
- Cream, then and nowFountain cream was generally lighter than modern heavy cream, closer to today's light cream or half-and-half. Six tablespoons of modern heavy cream will make the shake noticeably heavier than intended; cut it with milk or use half-and-half.
- Orange syrupThis means a fountain syrup of sugar and orange juice rather than a soft-drink concentrate; formulas varied. Bottled orange soda syrup or a Mexican jarabe will read as candy against the cream.
- The raw egg whiteNothing in this drink is cooked. Use pasteurized egg white, either in shell or from a carton, particularly for anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised. Carton whites foam a little less but hold long enough for one glass.
- Shake hard, then strainShake hard -- the egg white is there for a head, and that takes real effort: shake until the tin frosts. The recipe simply says to pour into the glass, but straining out the spent ice will stop the drink watering down as it stands.
- Fill up with milkAdd the milk after the shake goes into the glass, pouring down the side, so the foam stays on top. Whole milk is what the original assumes.
- YieldOne tall glass, about 10 to 12 oz once the milk goes in. It does not keep, and it does not double well in a single shaker.
"Knickerbocker" is New York shorthand, borrowed from the fictitious Dutch historian Diedrich Knickerbocker whom Washington Irving invented in 1809, and by the later nineteenth century it was attached to anything the city wanted to claim as its own, from a rum-and-raspberry cocktail to baseball clubs and hotels. Here the name has been carried over to a temperance shake: On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of dry-drink collections published as national prohibition arrived, and its method is straight from the drugstore fountain, where egg white, cream and fruit syrup were the standard building blocks of a drink meant to feel substantial without spirits. The egg shake was also sold as something close to a tonic for invalids and thin children, and these books treat a raw egg in a glass of milk as unremarkable.