Home › Grape Juice › The Nassau
The Nassau
Mix two tablespoonfuls each of grape syrup, orgeat syrup, and sweet cream. Add one egg. Shake, and strain into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice. Fill up with cold milk.
A soda-fountain milk shake from the temperance era, built on syrups rather than spirits. The single obstacle is the whole raw egg, which in this drink is never heated at any point.
- Why it failsThe egg is shaken cold into cream and milk and served immediately, so nothing in the glass ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella in a raw shell egg. Unlike an eggnog cooked into a custard, or a whiskey flip whose alcohol offers some limited protection, this drink has no heat step and no acid or spirit to speak of. If you want a fountain egg drink, use a current recipe with defined handling; do not follow this one as printed.
- Orgeat syrupA sweet almond syrup, historically made from blanched sweet almonds with a trace of rose or orange-flower water. Commercial orgeat is still sold for cocktail use, though modern brands vary widely in almond content and sweetness. Some older orgeat formulas leaned on bitter almond or benzaldehyde flavouring, which is another reason to read a label rather than reach for an antique recipe.
- Grape syrupNot grape juice, but a thick sweetened grape concentrate of the kind soda fountains kept in pump jars. The nearest current equivalents are grape syrup sold for shaved ice or the boiled-down concentrates sold as grape molasses.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means simply not soured or cultured, i.e. ordinary fresh cream.
- Measure and vesselTwo tablespoonfuls of each syrup plus cream, one egg, and milk to fill suggests a fountain glass of perhaps 10 to 12 ounces, though the recipe names no size. "Cracked ice" is ice broken into irregular pieces larger than crushed, so it melts more slowly than crushed ice in the glass it is served over.
- YieldOne glass.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of dry-drink books published as national prohibition approached, when a repertoire was wanted that looked and cost like a mixed drink but contained no spirits. The Nassau is a plain example of the strategy: the shaker, the strainer, the cracked ice and the egg all come straight from the saloon flip and the whiskey nog, with grape and almond syrups standing in for the liquor. Egg drinks were a fountain staple well before that, sold partly as refreshment and partly as nourishment. Grape juice in particular carried a temperance halo in these years, promoted heavily as the wholesome, unfermented alternative to wine.