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The Jefferson
To one egg add two tablespoonfuls of vanilla syrup, six tablespoonfuls of sweet cream, and two and one half teaspoonfuls of malted milk. Shake well with a little ice, strain into a glass, and add soda water.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink of the type once mixed by the thousands, and it is the raw egg that makes it a problem now rather than any question of technique.
- The egg is never cookedThe whole egg is shaken cold with cream and syrup and served immediately. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and the drink is not held long enough for acid or alcohol to do anything either — there is no acid and no spirit in it at all.
- Cold dairy plus raw egg, served in bulkCold dairy plus raw egg -- Cream and malted milk provide a good growth medium, and the drink sits in a glass while it is drunk. A fountain would have mixed and served it immediately; the risk was accepted rather than avoided.
- Who this reachesEgg drinks were pressed on invalids, children and convalescents precisely because they were thought nourishing. Those are the groups for whom a raw-egg beverage is least advisable today.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built for pasteurised ingredients rather than adapting this one.
- Vanilla syrup, for the recordFountain vanilla syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with vanilla extract, sweeter than most modern coffee-shop syrups. Two tablespoonfuls in a single glass tells you how sweet these drinks were expected to be.
- Malted milkThe malted milk called for is the plain powder — malted barley and wheat extract with dried milk — not a chocolate malt mix. Two and a half teaspoonfuls is a light hand; it was there for body and a faintly savoury edge against all that syrup.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of soft-drink manuals published as temperance sentiment hardened toward national prohibition, and here a plain fountain mixture carries a presidential name — The Jefferson. Egg drinks were a mainstay of that counter, sold as food as much as beverage, and the malted milk in this one points to a genuinely new industrial ingredient: dried malted milk powder is generally traced to the brothers James and William Horlick, who patented it in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1883, and by the 1910s it had moved from the sickroom and the explorer's kit to the fountain as a standard flavour and thickener. The pattern of the recipe — egg, syrup, cream, a shake with ice, strain, then top with soda from the tap — is the same shape a bartender used, which was rather the point.