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Raspberry Shake
Break an egg into a shaker, add a dash of raspberry syrup and a teaspoonful of powdered sugar. Add milk and shake thoroughly. Strain into a glass and put a grating of nutmeg on the top.
This is a soda-fountain egg shake: a whole raw egg shaken with milk, syrup and sugar, served cold. Nothing in it is ever heated, and that is the problem.
- Raw egg, no heat stepThe egg goes into the shaker whole and reaches the glass raw. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less commonly, within the egg itself, and shaking with cold milk does not eliminate it. Fountain practice of this period predated any understanding of internal contamination in intact eggs.
- Milk assumed raw or lightly handledDepending on when and where this was written, retail milk may well have been unpasteurised. A cold, sweetened, protein-rich drink left standing would be a favourable medium for whatever it started with.
- No quantities to work from"A dash" of syrup and "add milk" give no volumes at all. The recipe assumes a fountain man with a standard shaker tin and a practised hand, not a home cook. If you want a raspberry milkshake, use a current recipe.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. A finer grain would dissolve more readily in cold liquid.
- Raspberry syrupThe fountain syrup of the era was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with raspberry juice, closer to a modern soda syrup than to the thin dessert coulis sold under the same name today.
- The nutmegGrated nutmeg on top of an egg drink is a garnish shared with eggnog and flip, and is often said to offset the flavour of raw egg. Whatever its function, it places this drink in the same family.
History: Egg drinks were a staple of the American soda fountain, and temperance-minded publications of the period did reprint fountain formulas so a proprietor could offer something substantial in place of a whisky flip; whether that was this book's purpose is not clear from the page itself. Egg-and-milk preparations were widely given to invalids and the underfed, which is part of why the whole egg mattered — it made the drink food rather than refreshment. The nutmeg, the shaker and the whole raw egg are all shared with the alcoholic flip and eggnog, which is why a teetotal raspberry shake looks so much like a bar drink with the spirits left out.