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The Baltimore
Mix two tablespoonfuls of grape syrup and one tablespoonful of vanilla syrup. Add one egg. Shake well; strain into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice, and add two spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream. Shake well and fill up the glass with milk.
This is a fountain egg shake, and the egg goes in raw and stays raw — nothing in the procedure brings it above refrigerator temperature.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole shell egg is broken into the shaker and served straight, chilled by cracked ice and diluted with cold milk. There is no cooking step and no acid or alcohol strong enough to matter, so any Salmonella present in or on the egg reaches the drinker intact.
- Cold milk and ice cream alongside itThe finished glass is a nutrient-rich dairy mixture, though it is kept cold by the cracked ice and the milk. The raw egg remains the vehicle of concern. A current recipe using pasteurised product should be followed instead.
- Why not simply substituteWe do not print revised times or temperatures for drinks like this, because there is no cooking step to revise — the recipe's whole method is agitation and dilution.
- Grape syrup and vanilla syrupThese are fountain syrups, not beverages: heavy sugar syrups flavoured to be diluted at the counter. Grape syrup here means a sweetened concentrate of grape juice, not the unsweetened bottled juice sold today.
- "Two spoonfuls" is ambiguousThe recipe specifies tablespoonfuls for the syrups but only "spoonfuls" for the ice cream, and the quantity cannot be pinned down from the text.
- YieldOne tall soda-fountain glass, roughly 10 to 12 ounces once the milk fills it up.
Soda-fountain guides like this one belonged to a genre often associated with the spread of temperance sentiment through American towns, though the fountain's growth owed much to the drugstore trade as well: the fountain was sold as a respectable rival to the saloon, and books of this sort trained dispensers in a repertoire of syrups, phosphates, frappés and shakes.