Home › Strawberry and Raspberry › Newport Egg Shake
Newport Egg Shake
To one tablespoonful of raspberry vinegar and four tablespoonfuls of raspberry syrup add one egg and one fourth glassful of cracked ice. Shake well, strain into glass, and fill up with soda water.
A soda-fountain egg shake from the temperance era, built on a shrub base. The measurements translate easily, but the whole egg is the problem: it goes into the glass raw and is never heated at any point.
- Why the cautionA whole shell egg is shaken with ice and acid and served immediately, so nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shaking, cracked ice, and the acid of raspberry vinegar do not pasteurise anything; the egg is as raw in the glass as it was in the shell. Anyone wanting an egg-based soda today should follow a current recipe written around pasteurised egg.
- Raspberry vinegarNot a salad vinegar in the modern sense but a sweetened fruit shrub syrup, thick and tart, made by steeping raspberries in vinegar and boiling the strained juice with sugar. Present-day bottles labelled raspberry vinegar are far sharper and thinner and are not the same thing.
- Raspberry syrupThe soda-fountain standard: a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with raspberry juice, roughly the consistency of the pump syrups still sold for shaved ice. Four tablespoons is a substantial dose of sugar, which is what the sour vinegar is there to cut.
- "One fourth glassful"The reference is the fountain glass of the period, whose capacity the recipe does not state; on a common 8-ounce glass this would be roughly a quarter cup of cracked ice, more if the glass was larger. Cracked rather than cubed ice chills and aerates faster in a hand shaker.
- Soda waterPlain carbonated water, drawn cold and under pressure from the fountain. Modern club soda or seltzer is the equivalent; tonic water is not, as its quinine and added sugar would fight the syrup.
- YieldOne glass, filled up with soda water after straining. The recipe as printed serves a single drinker.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a genre of American drink books that appeared as temperance sentiment gathered force on the very eve of national Prohibition: collections of sodas, shakes, punches and phosphates meant to give the fountain the same social role as the bar. The egg shake was a mainstay of that trade, valued as much for the foamy body an egg gives a carbonated drink as for the nourishment Victorians attributed to it. Raspberry vinegar itself is older still, a nineteenth-century farmhouse shrub kept in the pantry as a summer cooler and often given to invalids; its combination with fountain syrup and soda water is precisely the sort of hybrid the soda counter produced, taking a rural preserve and making it a city refreshment. Names like "Newport" appear on fountain drinks of the period, and it is tempting to suppose they borrowed the glamour of a fashionable resort rather than recording any real origin there.