The Atlanta
Beat up the white of one egg with two tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup, and beat up the yolk with two tablespoonfuls of grated pineapple. Mix, and put into a shaker with two more tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup, and a ladleful of vanilla ice cream. Shake well and pour into glass and fill up with soda water. Serve with straws.
This is a soda-fountain formula from the era when a whole raw egg was a standard fountain ingredient. That is the part that does not carry over.
- Raw egg, never heatedBoth the white and the yolk go into the glass raw and stay raw — nothing in the drink reaches any temperature at all, and the ice cream and soda water only chill it further. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the yolk as well as on the shell, and a cold, sweet, dairy-based drink is a hospitable medium. If you want a drink of this kind, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg or no egg.
- Why the egg was there at allFountain "egg drinks" were commonly promoted as nourishing rather than as novelties, and the raw egg supplied body and a thicker foam in the shaker. Removing it changes the drink substantially, so a modern version is better treated as a different recipe than as an edit of this one.
- What a ladleful wasThe recipe gives no measure for "a ladleful"; it meant whatever the shop's own ice-cream dipper held, that is, a scoop rather than a spoonful.
- Chocolate syrup, fountain gradeFountain chocolate syrup was cooked from cocoa, sugar and water to a heavy density, and was not the same product as a modern squeeze-bottle sundae sauce.
- Grated pineappleThis means fresh fruit grated to a pulp with its juice, or the tinned "grated pineapple" packed for fountains -- not crushed pineapple in heavy syrup, which brings its own sugar. Fresh (unheated) pineapple contains bromelain, which can slacken a dairy drink if it stands.
- Soda waterFountain soda was drawn under pressure from a carbonator. "Fill up with soda water" means topping off the glass, and the quantity made serves one.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of soda-fountain and "soft drink" manuals published as American temperance sentiment moved toward national Prohibition; the water wagon of the title is the one a reformed drinker climbs onto. Fountain books of this kind named drinks after cities, hotels, colleges and baseball teams, which is how a chocolate-pineapple egg shake ends up called "The Atlanta." The recipe gives a fair sense of what such a drink involved: house-made syrups, an egg broken to order, the white and the yolk each beaten with their own flavouring before being mixed, and a finish under the carbonator. Egg drinks, egg phosphates and egg lemonades were sold across the counter as restoratives well into the 1920s, and the germ theory of the day had not yet dislodged the belief that a fresh raw egg was among the safest and most strengthening things a druggist could sell.