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The Palisades
Put into a shaker the whites of two eggs, a tablespoonful of pineapple syrup, and a tablespoonful of vanilla ice cream. Add shaved ice, and shake thoroughly. Strain into a glass and fill up with cold milk. A grating of nutmeg may be added, or pineapple cubes.
A soda-fountain drink of the egg-and-milk school: shaken cold, thickened with white and a spoonful of ice cream, served straight up in a tall glass. It comes together in two minutes once the syrup is on hand.
- Raw egg whiteThe whites are never cooked, so use pasteurized whites (in shell or carton) if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised. Shaking does nothing to the pathogen risk; it only aerates.
- Two whites is a lotFor a single glass, two whites give a dense, almost meringue-like head that many drinkers now find heavy. One white is closer to modern proportion, and it will still foam if you shake hard.
- Pineapple syrupThis means fountain syrup: a sweetened pineapple concentrate, cooked and strained. Bar-grade pineapple syrup works; canned pineapple juice alone is far thinner and less sweet, and the drink will taste watery.
- A tablespoonful of ice creamAbout a tablespoon, roughly 15 ml: a token amount for body and richness, not a milkshake base. Use plain vanilla; heavily stabilized ice creams may sit less well with the egg foam.
- Shaved iceShaved or cracked ice melts fast, chilling and diluting at once. With modern cubes, a short hard shake is enough; shaking on will thin the drink.
- StrainingStrain through a standard bar strainer into a glass, then top with cold milk. Whole milk carries the pineapple better than skim.
- NutmegGrate it over the finished foam at the table. Pre-ground nutmeg sinks and tastes flat; the point of the garnish is aroma at the first sip.
- YieldOne tall glass. It does not scale gracefully in a shaker.
This comes from the American soda-fountain literature of roughly the 1890s to the 1920s, when the drugstore counter was the respectable alternative to the saloon and "on the water wagon" was everyday slang for going dry. Egg drinks were a fountain staple long before that — eggnog served cold and unspiked, the egg phosphate — because a shaken white gave a milk drink body and a head of foam without cream or alcohol. Naming individual mixtures after landmarks was standard fountain practice; the Palisades are the traprock cliffs facing New York City across the Hudson, then a popular excursion destination, and the name is decorative rather than descriptive. Recipes like this one are a useful reminder that the milkshake did not arrive fully formed: it grew out of exactly this kind of shaken egg-milk-syrup drink, with ice cream creeping in a spoonful at a time.