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The Eldorado
Mix one and one half tablespoonfuls each of pineapple and vanilla syrups. Add one egg, a ladleful of vanilla ice cream, and a little shaved ice. Shake and strain. Add soda water.
A soda-fountain egg drink from the era when every drugstore had a marble counter and a tank of carbonated water. The measures and vessels are fountain measures, and the whole egg goes in raw and stays raw.
- Why this one fails nowThe egg is broken raw into a cold drink and never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact shell egg rather than only on the surface. A fountain of this period worked with eggs of unknown age and uncertain storage; nothing in the method compensates. If you want a drink of this type, use a current recipe written around pasteurized product.
- Nor does the ice helpShaved ice and shaking chill and dilute but do nothing microbiologically. The drink is also served immediately to be drunk at the counter, so there is no holding step where anything is reduced.
- A ladlefulThe fountain ice-cream ladle or disher of the period held on the order of one and a third to one and a half fluid ounces of packed ice cream. Not a soup ladle.
- Fountain syrupsPineapple and vanilla syrups here are the thick sweetened fountain syrups sold to druggists by the gallon, considerably heavier than a thin simple syrup and much sweeter than modern coffee syrups.
- Soda waterThis means charged water drawn from a pressurised tank at the counter, colder than most bottled sparkling water, and drawn in a coarse then fine stream to build the head. Quantity is left to the dispenser -- presumably enough to fill the fountain glass.
- Shake and strainThe straining is the point: it catches shell fragments, the chalazae and any unbroken ropes of white, and it holds back the shaved ice so the carbonated water is added to a clear, cold base rather than to a slush.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of soda-fountain manuals published as the temperance movement gathered force in the years before national Prohibition, when the drugstore counter was pitched openly as the respectable alternative to the saloon bar. Egg drinks were a mainstay of that trade: an egg shaken into syrup and charged water gave a fountain drink body, foam and a claim to nourishment, and the same logic produced the egg phosphate, the egg lemonade and the egg malted milk that fill these books. Grandiose single-word names such as Eldorado were the fountain man's stock in trade, printed on wall cards to make a cheap glass sound like an occasion; they rarely describe the contents. The whole raw egg, unremarkable at a fountain counter of the period, is the detail that dates the recipe most sharply.