Home › Egg Drinks › Oriental Egg
Oriental Egg
Mix four tablespoonfuls of orgeat syrup and four tablespoonfuls of sweet cream, add one egg and cracked ice. Shake well and strain into glass adding cold milk to fill glass. Serve with straws.
A soda-fountain drink from the era when the fountain was the respectable alternative to the bar. Its structure is sound, but it rests on a whole raw egg that is never heated at any point.
- Why this one failsThe egg goes into the shaker raw and reaches the glass raw, carried in cold cream and cold milk with no acid, alcohol or heat anywhere in the process. Salmonella in shell eggs is an internal risk, not a surface one, so washing or picking a good egg does not address it. Anyone wanting a drink of this type should follow a current recipe written with that risk in mind.
- OrgeatOrgeat is a sweet almond syrup, usually perfumed with orange-flower water. The name comes from barley (orge), which was the original base before almonds took over; fountain orgeat of this period was almond-based.
- Bitter almond in old orgeatCommercial and homemade orgeat of the early twentieth century was frequently sharpened with bitter almond or its essence, which carries cyanogenic compounds. Modern orgeat and almond extract are made to a controlled standard; period formulas were not.
- The measurementsFour tablespoonfuls is a quarter cup, so the drink starts with a quarter cup each of syrup and cream — very rich and very sweet by present taste, before any milk goes in.
- The glassA drink "filled with cold milk" and served with straws implies a tall glass rather than a cocktail glass, though the recipe does not say what size. The recipe makes one.
- "Strain into glass"The straining is there to catch the cracked ice, not to clarify anything.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance-era literature of non-alcoholic drinks: books that set out to prove a drink could match the saloon drink for drink, minus the alcohol. Egg drinks were useful to that argument, since a shaken egg gave body and foam where spirits could not, and drinks of the "egg phosphate" and "egg lemonade" type recur in such books. The recipe itself gives no explanation for the "Oriental" label beyond the almond and orange-flower flavouring.