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Pineapple and Egg
Put one egg into a shaker with two tablespoonfuls of pineapple syrup, two tablespoonfuls of sweet cream, and half a teaspoonful of lemon juice. Add a little cracked ice and shake thoroughly. Pour into a glass and add soda water. A grating of nutmeg may be added.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink, and the egg is the problem: it is swallowed entirely raw, with nothing in the glass that will kill anything living in it.
- Raw shell egg, never heatedThe whole egg goes into the shaker and straight into the glass. Nothing here reaches a temperature that inactivates Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean-looking shell rather than only on its surface. Cracked ice and soda water do nothing to it.
- Cream and sugar do not helpSweet cream and pineapple syrup make a mild, protein-rich, sugary medium held at room temperature while it is shaken and poured. Half a teaspoonful of lemon juice is far too little acid to matter.
- Who is most at riskChildren, older drinkers, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised are least able to tolerate an invasive infection, and egg drinks of this kind were often promoted as nourishing. If you want an egg cream or a flip, use a current recipe written around a pasteurized product.
- Reading the original"Pineapple syrup" is fountain syrup, not canned juice: it is a sweetened flavouring syrup, so the drink is sweeter than the ingredient list suggests. "Sweet cream" simply means fresh cream as opposed to soured, and "soda water" is plain carbonated water drawn under pressure, not a flavoured soft drink.
- ScaleOne egg, four tablespoonfuls of liquid and a fill of soda make a single glass, which is what the recipe yields.
Egg drinks were a fixture of the American soda fountain from the late nineteenth century, sold less as a treat than as a tonic: an egg beaten into cream, syrup and charged water was widely promoted as a light meal for invalids, clerks and children, and the dispenser's trade manuals of the period run to dozens of variations on it. The drinks they collected borrowed the shaker, the cracked ice and the grating of nutmeg directly from the cocktail repertoire the egg flip had long shared. The result reads as a cocktail with the liquor lifted out, which is more or less what it was.