Milk Snap
Add the beaten white of an egg to one glass of cold milk and one fourth glass of ginger syrup. Shake thoroughly and serve with a bit of grated lemon peel.
This is a soda-fountain drink built on an uncooked egg white, and nothing in it ever reaches a temperature that would make the egg safe. The notes below explain the problem and the period details.
- The raw egg is the failure pointThe white is beaten and shaken into cold milk and served immediately. Salmonella in shell eggs can be present on the shell and within the egg, and a cold drink neither heats nor acidifies it enough to matter. If you want an egg-white drink, use pasteurised egg white or follow a current recipe.
- Cold milk compounds itThere is no cooking step for the dairy either. Nothing here is heated at any stage.
- What a "glass" meantGlasses of the period varied, commonly somewhere between about 6 and 10 ounces; if a glass is taken as 8 ounces, a quarter glass of syrup works out at about 2 fluid ounces. One serving is the whole recipe. The measure is genuinely loose, which is normal for counter work written for a dispenser rather than a cook.
- Ginger syrupFountain ginger syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with ginger, and some published formulas add capsicum for bite. The ginger syrups sold today for cocktails are the nearest substitute.
The soda fountain was the institution that made drinking in company without liquor plausible: by the 1890s American druggists were dispensing shakes, phosphates, egg drinks and flips from a fixed repertoire of syrups, and the vocabulary of those drinks borrowed heavily from the bar. An egg white shaken into milk may well be an echo of the gin fizz and the flip, and ginger syrup arguably supplied a warmth that a spirit would otherwise have given, though that is a suggestion rather than a demonstrable lineage.