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The Bellevue
Whip with a silver fork the white of one egg with four tablespoonfuls of rich cream. Add three tablespoonfuls of pineapple syrup. Put into a shaker and add soda water. Shake well and strain into a tall glass. Put a spoonful of whipped cream on top.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink of the Prohibition era, and its central ingredient is a raw egg white that is never heated at any point.
- The raw egg white is the problemThe white is whipped, shaken with cream and soda water, and served cold. Nothing in the sequence brings it near the 160F at which Salmonella is killed. Shell eggs in 1919 came from a very different supply chain than the one this drink would draw on today, and the risk is not one a home cook should accept from an uncooked beverage.
- Cream compounds itCombining raw egg with dairy that then sits at room temperature in a shaker is exactly the condition food-safety guidance is written to prevent. Use a current recipe if you want a fountain-style drink of this kind.
- Pineapple syrupNot canned pineapple juice, but the thick sweetened fountain syrup kept in pumps behind the counter — roughly a heavy sugar syrup flavoured and coloured with pineapple. Three tablespoonfuls of it carried most of the sweetness in the glass.
- Soda waterThis meant charged water drawn under pressure from a fountain rather than a bottled product. Shaking carbonated water, as the recipe directs, would knock gas out of it.
- The silver forkPeriod recipes commonly specify silver for beating eggs, a convention of the time rather than a requirement of the drink.
- YieldOne tall glass, as written. Fountain drinks of this type were typically served in glasses of roughly eight to twelve ounces once the soda went in.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of books published as America moved toward national prohibition: collections of soft drinks, fruit cups and fountain concoctions offered as respectable substitutes for the bar. Drinks like this one — egg white, cream, a flavoured syrup and charged water — came straight out of the professional soda fountain, which by the 1910s was a serious commercial trade with its own trade press and its own manuals of formulas. Named drinks were commonly christened after hotels, resorts and clubs, though whether The Bellevue took its name that way is a guess rather than anything documented. What the recipe really records is a moment when the fountain, not the saloon, was the fashionable place to be served something in a tall glass, and when a raw egg white was an unremarkable way to give a cold drink body and a lasting head of foam.