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The Narragansett
Cover four tablespoonfuls of fresh strawberries with powdered sugar and let stand over night. When ready to use mash and put into a tall glass with a ladleful of ice cream. Beat one egg to a light froth and add to the strawberries and cream. Fill up the glass with soda water and add whipped cream.
A soda-fountain drink from the temperance era, built the way a counterman would build it: fruit, ice cream, egg, soda, whipped cream. The egg is the problem, and it is not a small one.
- The raw egg is the reason to stopA whole shell egg is beaten to a froth and stirred into a cold glass that is never heated at any point. Raw egg in an uncooked drink carries a real risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, which lives inside intact, clean-looking eggs and is not addressed by chilling or by the acidity of the fruit. If you want a strawberry ice-cream soda, use a current recipe.
- Overnight at room temperatureThe instruction is simply to sugar the berries and "let stand over night"; no storage condition is specified. Cut fruit left out for eight to twelve hours in a modern heated kitchen is its own separate hazard, independent of the egg.
- "Four tablespoonfuls of fresh strawberries"Measured whole, before mashing, this is genuinely ambiguous. It reads as roughly a small handful of berries, but the original gives no weight and no indication of whether they are hulled and sliced.
- LadlefulThe recipe gives no size for the ladle; read it as one generous scoop of ice cream rather than a serving bowl's worth.
- Soda waterPeriod soda water was drawn from a pressurised fountain, which may well have given a livelier charge than bottled seltzer.
- YieldOne tall glass, built and served immediately.
Egg drinks were standard equipment behind the soda fountain, not an eccentricity: an egg thickened a glass, gave it body and a lasting head, and let a druggist sell a beverage that doubled as something nourishing for an invalid or a working man skipping dinner. Names like "the Narragansett" belong to the same fashion that produced regional and patriotic labels for house specialties; the drink itself is a strawberry ice-cream soda with an egg in it, and the name tells you more about fountain marketing than about Rhode Island.