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The Monticello
Whip the white of one egg with four tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Put in shaker with three tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup. Shake well and pour into glass and add soda water.
A soda-fountain formula of the sort a druggist would build to order at the counter. It reads clearly, but one ingredient puts it outside what a modern kitchen should serve.
- Why the cautionThe white of one egg is whipped, shaken with cream and syrup, and served cold. Nothing in the drink ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present in the shell and the interior of an intact raw egg. A soda fountain of the period had no way to know that; we do. If you want a chocolate cream soda, use a current recipe.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured — ordinary fresh cream, as opposed to the soured or cultured cream that was still common in home kitchens. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest match to what a fountain kept on ice.
- Chocolate syrupFountain chocolate syrup of the period was generally a cooked syrup of cocoa, sugar and water; its sweetness and bitterness varied by house formula. Three tablespoons suggests a full soda glass rather than a small tumbler.
- The shakerNot a cocktail shaker in the modern bar sense but the fountain's metal shaker cup. The shaking is doing the work of an aerator: it emulsifies the cream and egg white so the soda water foams up into a head instead of separating.
- Soda waterDrawn from a pressurised siphon or fountain tap at the counter. It was added last, into the glass, so the carbonation lifted the shaken mixture rather than being beaten flat.
- YieldOne glass. Fountain glasses varied, but the syrup, cream and egg are proportioned for a single tall serving.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of soft-drink and soda-fountain manuals published in the years just before and during national Prohibition, when "on the water wagon" was everyday slang for having given up liquor. Books like it gave druggists, confectioners and hotel men a stock of named non-alcoholic drinks that could be sold with some of the ceremony of a bar order — hence a plain chocolate cream soda dressed up as "The Monticello." The egg-and-cream construction is older than the temperance trade, though: egg whites had long been shaken into flips, nogs and "egg phosphates" for body and foam.