The Fulton
Mix four tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup with six tablespoonfuls of plain cream. Break in an egg and shake with ice until thoroughly blended. Strain into glass and add soda water, using the syphon.
A soda-fountain egg drink of the Prohibition era, built on the same template as an egg cream or egg phosphate. The problem is the egg, which never sees any heat at any point.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whole egg is broken into cold cream, shaken with ice and served immediately. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would reduce Salmonella. A soda fountain could rely on fast turnover and a public that accepted the risk; that is not a trade a home cook needs to make.
- Cream compounds the problemSix tablespoons of plain cream sat alongside the raw egg in the shaker, and cream of the period may not have been pasteurised. Even with pasteurised cream today, the egg remains uncooked and the drink is not made safe by refrigeration alone. If you want a chocolate egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurised shell eggs or a cooked custard base.
- What the measurements meanFor reference rather than for making: four tablespoons of chocolate syrup is a quarter cup, and six tablespoons of cream a little over a third of a cup. The recipe does not specify how much soda water to add or what size glass to use.
- The syphonA syphon is a charged seltzer bottle, the pressurised glass or metal vessel with a lever-operated spout that was standard fountain and sideboard equipment. The recipe gives no reason for specifying it, though a pressurised stream would raise a head of foam on the egg and cream.
- Chocolate syrupFountain chocolate syrup of the period was typically cocoa, sugar and water cooked to a thin syrup, sometimes with a little salt or vanilla, and was generally less sweet and less viscous than a modern squeeze-bottle syrup.
- YieldOne glass.
Books like this one appeared in quantity around the coming of national Prohibition, when the soda fountain was promoted as the replacement for the saloon bar. The fountain menu was assembled to give teetotallers something with the ceremony and vocabulary of a mixed drink -- shaken with ice, strained, built in a tall glass. Egg drinks were central to that pitch, because an egg shaken into cream and soda gave body and foam and let the fountain sell the beverage as nourishing rather than merely sweet; the egg phosphate, egg chocolate and egg malted all belong to the same family. Named drinks such as this one were commonly christened for hotels, steamships, buildings or streets, and the Fulton may well be one of those local borrowings, though nothing here settles where the name came from.