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Niagara Egg Shake
Break an egg into a shaker and add two tablespoonfuls each of vanilla syrup, grape juice, and sweet cream. Add cracked ice and shake well. Strain into a glass, fill up with cold milk, and put a few gratings of nutmeg on top.
A soda-fountain egg shake from the temperance era, built in a cocktail shaker and finished like an eggnog. The construction is straightforward; the raw egg is the problem.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whole egg goes into the shaker and into the glass without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs remain a recognised source of salmonellosis, and shaking with ice does nothing to it. This is the reason the drink should not be made from the text as printed; use a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs if you want the style.
- The dairy compounds itCream and milk are added cold and the drink is served immediately, so anything present in the egg has an ideal medium and no heat step. In the period before universal milk pasteurization, the milk itself may not have been pasteurized either, a risk the book never mentions.
- Vanilla syrupFountain vanilla syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with vanilla, generally sweeter and thicker than the vanilla syrups bottled today.
- Grape juiceIn this period this means unfermented bottled Concord juice, sweet and strongly foxy in flavour, not the paler juices pressed from wine grapes. Welch's was the dominant brand and was heavily promoted to temperance households.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means simply not soured, as opposed to the sour cream also kept in kitchens. Ordinary pouring cream is what is meant.
- Shaker and strainThe cracked ice chills and aerates; straining leaves the ice behind, and the glass is then topped with cold milk. The recipe gives no glass size, so the yield depends on the glass used.
Soda fountains were promoted as the respectable alternative to the saloon, and dispensers needed a repertoire that looked and felt like mixed drinks. Egg shakes and egg phosphates were fountain staples: the raw egg gave body and a foamy head, and it also carried a reputation as nourishment, which let a sweet drink be sold as something restorative. The shaker, the strain and the grating of nutmeg are all borrowed straight from bar practice, and nutmeg on a dairy drink is an old habit inherited from posset and eggnog. The name is decoration rather than provenance; fountain formularies routinely attached place names to drinks.